


Diversions

by the_wordbutler



Series: Motion Practice [18]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Comicverse), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Young Avengers
Genre: Alternate Universe, Legal Drama, Multi, motion practice universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2014-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-31 20:26:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 139,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wordbutler/pseuds/the_wordbutler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves.  In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.</p><p>But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Second Year

**Author's Note:**

> As previously stated in other disclaimers: the following story is a work of fiction. I was a law student when I started this series, and most of my inspiration to start down this crazy path originated when I worked as an intern at an office not unlike the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office.
> 
> That said, any similarity in this story to real people, places, events, or cases is entirely accidental. Nothing in this story is based directly off my experience. At no time have I lifted real cases, scenarios, or people from my work life and deposited them into this fic, and I won’t be doing so. Ever.
> 
> Along those lines, too, please keep in mind: this is fiction. Although some of the law featured in this story is based on the real law of my jurisdiction, I have done no or very little additional research. Legal concepts may be oversimplified, under-nuanced, or simply _wrong_ for the purpose of the narrative. Some details may be incorrect or omitted. **Nothing in this story purports to be legal advice of any kind**. 
> 
> This story involves characters which first appeared in Motion Practice. Reading the rest of the stories for context is not required but may be helpful. This story will spoil the events of previous stories if you’ve not read them first.
> 
> Thank you as always to Jen and saranoh, who are both wonderful beta-readers and better friends. 
> 
> Additionally: the events of ["Sandwich Cat"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/852249/chapters/1635527) occur in the time that Clint and Phil are living together and before their housewarming.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, Clint and Phil kick everyone out after their housewarming and try to enjoy one another's company. They almost succeed.

“We’re never having another housewarming,” Clint declares, flopping down on Phil’s couch. It’s not like his old couch, crappy and threadbare; it wraps him up in a cocoon of fluffy warmth. He never wants to leave it.

Phil knocks his feet off the coffee table so he can pick up the last couple straggling soda cans. “What if we move?”

“We won’t move. We’ll live in this house until you die of old age and I move into one of those homes for swinging elderly singles.” He watches the corner of Phil’s mouth twist into a tiny grin. “Rosemary’ll take good care of me.”

Phil stops filling up the garbage bag to glance over at him. “Rosemary?”

Clint shrugs. “I’ll be, what, eighty-five or ninety? I’ll need companionship, not sex.” Phil snorts at him and starts to step away, but Clint sticks his leg out and blocks his progress. When Phil sends him one of those long-suffering looks, he presses his foot to the guy’s hip and starts dragging him back toward the couch. “Besides, you’re a tough act to follow.”

“You know that implies that someone’s followed my ‘tough act’ at some point, yes?”

“Or that I’m making the safe assumption that nobody compares to you,” Clint returns. Phil rolls his eyes at the comment the same way he usually rolls his eyes at Stark’s antics, but he can’t hide the flush of pink that climbs up his neck. They’ve been dating for close to a year, now—if you count that first heady kiss in the park as the start to their relationship, and Clint definitely does—but they’re still good at catching one another off guard with compliments. Hell, Phil’d called him _superb_ in his one-year performance review at work, and Clint’d blushed like a school kid even as Fury and Maria’d rolled their eyes at the whole thing.

It’s still overwhelming, in a way, to think of the shape his life’s taken.

Which is why, instead of entertaining whatever dry comeback Phil’s planning, he overbalances Phil with his foot to knock him down onto the couch, then curls a fist in his shirt and kisses him. He mostly means it as a distraction, but Phil plants a hand on Clint’s side and seizes his mouth with the sort of heat they usually reserve for the bedroom. 

Not that Clint’s complaining or anything, because _hell_ no. Phil tastes like beer and barbeque sauce, smells like his cologne and all the spices from the kitchen, and feels like home.

Clint can count on one hand the number of times anything—person, place, object, whatever—has felt like home. He’s not sure how to explain that, though, so he just holds onto Phil a little tighter and makes more space for him on the couch. 

On _their_ couch, in _their_ house.

It’s kind of funny, the things that’ve transformed his life—pretty unremarkable and definitely solitary—into a life he shares with Phil, intertwined almost to the point where nobody can tell where one stops and the other starts. The bookshelves are crammed with books from both their collections, the DVD rack with all of Clint’s favorite movies, and as much as Phil bitched about it, there’s now an Xbox shoved next to Phil’s ancient VCR in the entertainment center. Phil and Maria’d spent a long weekend cleaning out Phil’s home office space so he and Clint could turn it into a kind of den; the file cabinet full of law review articles and material from Phil’s old cases is still shoved in the corner, sure, but now there’s Clint’s battered old couch and an extra table waiting to be covered with affidavits and police reports. They’d cut out of work early a couple days before Clint’d officially surrendered his own apartment and bought new sheets and towels, shit they could agree on (instead of Phil’s collection of bland bed linens). Sure, the kitchen cabinets felt a little cluttered with two sets of mismatched dishware and they still needed to find space for the rest of Clint’s work-out clothes, but it wasn’t just Phil’s place anymore, you know?

Better yet, Phil’d surprised him by framing a couple different pictures from their Christmas trip down to Samantha’s farm and scattered them around the house. Even just that morning before the party, Clint’d caught sight of the one of them posed in front of the tree and caught himself smiling all through his last-minute vacuuming frenzy.

He smiles against Phil’s mouth, warmed by the memory as much as the persistent weight and heat of Phil’s thigh pressed between his own, and Phil slowly pulls back. Clint groans and loops a leg behind his knees, trying to pin him in place. “You bored already, boss?” he asks, and he hates how breathless and needy he sounds.

Phil snorts a little at the nickname, but his eyes darken anyway. He watches as Clint wets his lips—mostly for effect, but hey, it _works_. “You were smirking,” he says, his thumb tracing a random shape along Clint’s side. Clint tries not to arch into it. “I’m trying to figure out whether it was a comment on my technique.”

“Can’t I just be happy that I’ve got you pinning me to the couch?”

“Generally, no,” Phil replies, and Clint smacks him in the shoulder before dragging him back down. Phil resists a little, his usual game of hard-to-get, and Clint rolls his hips up against Phil’s leg as reminder of why kissing is better than talking. Phil chuckles and finally leans back down into his personal space just in time for the doorbell to ring.

Clint tries to kiss him anyway, but his lips find the guy’s jawline. He swears under his breath, and Phil laughs again. “Housewarming’s over,” he observes, and grips Phil a little tighter as he tries to slip away. “It’s probably the Mormons.”

“I’ll assure them I’m Protestant and hurry back,” Phil promises, and Clint groans at him as ducks out of Clint’s grasp. He drags fingers through his hair and watches as Phil heads into the foyer. 

“If I finish cleaning up, can we take this to the bedroom?” he calls after him.

Phil pauses, one foot in the hallway, and twists to look at Clint over his shoulder. He’s wearing a plain white shirt that highlights the line of his back, and jeans that— Well, you can probably figure out what jeans do to Phil Coulson’s ass. Clint’s never appreciated denim more. 

“We’re taking this to the bedroom regardless of the cleaning,” he reports, and leaves Clint laughing on the couch.

Clint’s still sprawled there like some sort of half-debauched call girl when he hears Darcy’s voice declare that she thinks she left her phone somewhere in the house. He tries to sit up and deemphasize certain elements of the situation, but he’s too slow; by the time he’s standing, Darcy’s already in the doorway. She pauses in her explanation—something about laser tag with someone named Sam, and her new boyfriend’s relative uselessness—to stare at Clint, and Clint glances at the floor.

“Seriously?” she demands. When Clint peeks up at her, he discovers she’s shoved her hands in front of her face. “You emptied this place out ten minutes ago! God, this is worse than that time when I surprised Jane with an ice cream cake on her birthday. Just _no_.”

“It’s our house!” Clint retorts. Darcy shudders from head to toe before dropping her eyes to the floor and blindly groping along the entertainment center for her cell phone. When she comes up empty-handed, she inches toward the end table. “Stop acting like you don’t know what we do in our spare time. It’s not like you’re a blushing virgin or something.”

“I can at least keep my hands to myself for ten minutes!” she returns.

“Really? Because I saw you and Peter in the hallway the other day, and—”

“He brought me Nutella cookies. I’d make out with _you_ for Nutella cookies.”

“Please don’t,” Phil says, walking back into the room. He holds out something so sparkly and neon-blue that it can only be Darcy’s phone in this week’s retina-scalding case. “It’d be an excellent experience for you, but—”

“Coulson, if you ruin making out for me, I will kill myself just so I can haunt your ass.” She snatches her phone away from him, checks it for harm (and, Clint supposes, any reference to their sex life), and then drops it into her bag. “Did I leave it in the kitchen?”

“Bathroom,” Phil replies.

“Dammit, I do that at work too. Last time, Maria and Peggy took selfies to punish me.” She shakes her head for a second and then glances between the two of them. “I’m going to leave so you can get all of your sex stuff out of your system and maybe stop defiling Clint’s office.”

“That’s unlikely,” Phil deadpans, and Clint laughs so hard that he can’t even say goodbye to Darcy before she’s storming out of the house and slamming the door. He expects Phil to scold him for being a dick to Darcy—not because he doesn’t enjoy it, but because Darcy can be vindictive as hell—but instead, Phil reaches over and hooks his fingers in Clint’s belt loops. The breath rushes out of Clint’s lungs as Phil pins him against the nearest wall, and then again as Phil kisses him.

“I thought we were doing the bedroom thing,” he murmurs at some point between Phil’s fingers snaking under his shirt and Phil popping the button his jeans.

“Your impatience is rubbing off on me,” Phil replies, and that’s the last full sentence either of them speaks for a while.

Afterward, once Clint’s boxers are no longer strewn on the floor next to the couch and Phil’s finished panting (“Like the older man you are,” Clint’d commented before Phil’d reminded him that the couch is also a sofa sleeper), Clint offers to pick up the remaining messes from the party while Phil orders a pizza for dinner. He flips on the nightly news as he drops the last couple plates and napkins in the garbage bag and lets the dull drone of the anchorman’s voice wash over him; there was a car chase in Franklin County, a huge teenage house party got busted after a fight broke out, there’s rain in the forecast, the Chicago Cubs lost yet another game. He knows he should pay attention to current events, but instead, he stacks up coasters and straightens a lamp that Dot had knocked into while chasing Pepper around like a puppy. By the time he’s finished, Sandy’s emerged from her top-secret hiding place and winding her way around Clint’s ankles.

“We’re going to figure out where you hide, you know,” he informs the kitten.

She meows at him and then tries to trip him as he walks away.

Phil’s loading dishes into the dishwasher as Clint wanders through, the laptop with Domino’s pizza tracker set up in the middle of the table. Clint knows he should take the trash out and check the cat’s food and water, but for a second, he stands there like an idiot and watches the line of Phil’s back. Wade once spent a half-hour droning on about how he didn’t understand what Clint saw in Phil—not in a mean-spirited way, just in the sense that Clint was, quote, “one of the hottest things on two legs” and Phil was, also quote, “kind of unremarkable and weirdly geeky.” Clint never quite figured out how to explain that Phil’s supposed blandness isn’t bland at all, that his weird geeky quirks sometimes render him breathless, and that his competence lights Clint’s belly on fire every time he watches him in a courtroom. 

Sure, Phil’s not a mountain of muscles like Wade’s guy, or a billionaire like Bruce’s husband of choice, but he’s _Clint’s_ , and they love one another.

You can’t actually beat that.

Phil’s rinsing off some silverware when Clint comes back from taking out the trash. Clint crowds up behind him and flattens his hands against his hips. Phil hums a little, presumably in approval, so Clint presses his chest to Phil’s back and settles his nose in the place just above his shirt collar.

Phil shuts off the water before asking, “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s pretty much perfect,” Clint replies, and knows without looking that Phil’s smiling.


	2. The Suffolk County Evening News

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, Clint spends quality time with his favorite people, and a new case that comes into the district attorney’s office lands squarely in his lap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To avoid future confusion: “Boy Intern” (and whatever other colorful nicknames he receives throughout this story) is our very good friend Grant Ward from _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D._ For more information on Grant’s adventures as office intern, please consider reading [“The Cardboard Hedgehog (and Other Stories)”](http://archiveofourown.org/works/999399/chapters/1978750)—which, by the way, will be updating on this story’s off weeks from now until I figure out how that little series will end. 
> 
> The other interns are nameless, faceless non-characters and should not matter to you. (We can argue over whether Ward should matter later.)
> 
> On the legal front: the list of possible conflicts of interests for attorneys is long, but the general rule is this: an attorney can’t represent a client when confidential information about one of their previous clients would be implicated in the case, or when their personal interests would interfere with the case. The rules are in fact a lot more detailed than that, but nobody really wants to hear about the model rules of professional conduct. Right? Right.
> 
> Thanks (as always) to Jen and saranoh, who weather the storm that is my early-chapter freak-outs and clunky narrative oh so very well.

“Ready to go home, boss?” Clint asks almost two weeks after their housewarming, and rests his hip against the frame of Phil’s office door.

The early May sun’s already dipping behind the trees and buildings across from the judicial complex, transforming the late-afternoon sky into a kid’s painting, all pink and orange. Down in the park, the trees cast long shadows in the grass, their new leaves still not all the way uncurled; elementary-aged kids crowd the playground equipment and probably shout at each other while their parents check their watches and promise five more minutes before everybody heads home for dinner. Clint’d spent the last couple hours hashing out a motion with Bucky in the closet the guy calls an office, a tiny shoebox with a smaller window that overlooks the same little slice of park as Phil’s office. Every time they tripped over an argument or Bucky started swearing a blue streak at WestLaw—often, since the database’d kept crashing on them—Clint’d glanced down at the park and watched life wandering by, six stories below.

He remembered the first time he glanced down at that park, back when Fury brought him into his giant corner office on his very first day of work and implied he fit in with the league of extraordinary people wandering the halls.

Clint definitely didn’t believe him, back then. He’s not sure he believes him now, but somehow, extraordinary no longer feels like it’s a million miles away, either.

Phil’s stretching when Clint flicks his eyes back away from the window, one arm stretched up above his head and rustling his button-down. His overhead light’s already off—Bruce convinced the office to join some community green initiative, and one of the “challenges” involves cutting down on fluorescent bulbs—but his little desk lamp’s on, creating a puddle of yellow-white light on Phil’s latest project. That and the sun combine together, creating trickster shadows that age and de-age Phil almost simultaneously. One second, he’s fresh-faced and way too young, a whole different person from the man Clint fell in love with; the next, the lines around his eyes darken and he looks older and more drawn than a man twice his age.

He also fidgets with one of his rolled-up sleeves. It’s drooping, and there’s a smear of blue ink on the cuff. Clint grins at it. “Great, another casualty of war I get to hear you bitch about.”

“I don’t bitch about ink stains,” Phil corrects him. Even in the half-light, Clint catches his little smile. He pushes himself out of his chair and stretches again, flinching when something pops. “I need a job with less sitting.”

“You need fewer cases that are tied up in motion nightmares,” Clint replies, watching Phil grab his coat off the back of his chair. “Bucky said the case he’s supposed to second you on might get thrown out.”

Phil’s face crumples into a scowl. “Don’t remind me. Three different hearings about whether the officers could detain the defendant. I’m starting to think I’m living through my own version of _Groundhog Day_.”

Clint grins at him. “Y’know, that might explain why you’re getting so repetitive in—”

“Finish that sentence, and you’ll _miss_ me being repetitive,” Phil warns, and Clint holds his composure for all of four seconds before he bursts out laughing. Phil shakes his head and ducks to pick up his own bag, hiding his face from Clint, but Clint reads his body language like an open book: relaxed shoulders, easy slope of his back, the little tilt to his head. He’s smiling, maybe even chuckling to himself, and Clint’s gut wells up with warmth.

The day’s felt endless, for the most part, filled with poorly-written defense motions, a clumsy competency hearing in front of the unusually pissed-off Judge English, and three useless fights with Darcy. Clint’s sworn at the wall, at his computer, and at Bucky—once, accidentally, and he apologized immediately (and hopefully before Steve heard about it)—and his whole body feels a little wrung out. Back in February, Bruce’d warned him that the first couple weeks of spring bring all the shittiest criminal defendants out of hibernation; with the snow melted and the world thawing out, he’d explained, folks lost their very good reasons to stay inside and avoid the temptations of joy-riding in their neighbors’ tractors or driving drunk. Clint’d laughed at the guy and bought him another beer, swearing left and right that it wouldn’t be _that_ bad.

Then, the second week in March and with Darcy out on mysterious personal time—“I got dumped and needed to eat ice cream in my underwear, okay?” she’d sneered later, throwing a stack of files onto Clint’s desk—he’d charged twenty-three DUIs. 

In a single week.

He’s surprised Judge English hasn’t threatened to skin him alive, her schedule’s so full of traffic trials in the next couple weeks.

But as endless and ridiculous as his day—maybe even his _month_ —has felt, it washes away like sand swept into the tide when Phil switches off his stupid little “eco-friendly” desk lamp and steps in front of Clint. Clint supposes he expects him to slide out of the way and lead them out of the office. But he’s pretty sure they’re the last ones around, and Phil’s right there, rumpled and relaxed at Clint’s fingertips.

He knows because he reaches forward and touches Phil that way, just the very tips of his fingers brushing first along his stomach and then to his sides, drawing him close. Phil sucks in a breath that sounds a little like surprise, and Clint’s caught for a second by the heady thought that yeah, okay, he can still surprise the hell out of this guy.

Not in a bad way, but in a way that curls his toes in his shoes.

He kisses Phil there in the doorway, soft and slow. There’s no need for urgency, no hungry, scrabbling heat, because for once, they’ve got all the time in the damn world. There’s no hearings, no disciplinary committees, no stack of traffic tickets waiting to be transformed into criminal complaints. It’s two guys who happen to be kinda crazy about each other, end of story.

At least, ‘til Phil pulls back a couple inches and releases a long, easy sigh. “If you’d done that an hour ago, I might not’ve snapped at Maria.”

Clint snorts at him and shakes his head. “She almost slammed the door on Boy Intern’s fingers.”

“Boy Intern has a name.”

“Yeah, and no personality. Any blander, he’d be cardboard.” Phil shakes his head like he’s thinking about maybe rolling his eyes, so Clint nudges him in the side. “Maybe that’s what we’ll have Darcy put on his mailbox label.”

“I can’t believe I let you delegate that task to Darcy,” Phil grumbles.

Clint shrugs. “Hey, we were indisposed at the time, and somebody needed to do it.”

This time, Phil actually rolls his eyes. He holds his long-suffering face until Clint quirks an eyebrow at him, and then finally surrenders to a smile. After one last sweep of his office—because Phil’s not _Phil_ unless he ends his day with all his statute books in the right order—he pulls the door shut behind them. They bump shoulders in the hallway, soft and familiar, and fall into the same easy cadence of steps they’d perfected accidentally during the Killgrave trial.

It’s not until they’re out in the balmy May air that Clint thinks to ask, “You wanna grab Thai or something for dinner?”

Phil frowns at him, his eyebrows knitting together. “Please tell me you didn’t forget what tonight is,” he says. It reminds Clint of the way Judge Nyugen pronounces a sentence from the bench, so heavy and serious you might fall over from it. Which is why, of course, he blinks at the guy like they’re total strangers. “I put it in the calendar.”

“You know that Stark cluttered up the shared Outlook calendar with daily countdowns to Bruce’s birthday, right?” Clint returns. He watches the corner of Phil’s mouth twitch and, for a second, can’t tell whether he’s smiling or frowning. “We’re seventy-some days out, and apparently, the whole world needs to know.”

“I’m surprised you retained that we’re seventy-odd days out.”

“I’m surprised Stark’s not sleeping in his office because Bruce’s locked him out of the house.” Phil chuckles, a warm burst of sound, and Clint elbows him in the side. There’s all of five cars left in the parking lot—Maria’s hulking Jeep, plus a few that belong to various other county employees—and Clint watches Phil pop the trunk to his sedan. “C’mon. It’s not a birthday or an anniversary, so I’ve got nothing.”

Phil shakes his head. “Tonight, we’re shopping for Dot’s birthday present,” he says. Clint groans aloud and considers, briefly, beating his head against the trunk. Phil lifts his bag off him and shoves it in the car. “Steve wrote out a list—”

“Meaning we’re going to spend three hours finding the perfect gift from the perfect man’s perfect list.”

“—and if I have to listen to Tony complain about freeloaders who don’t buy his beloved goddaughter birthday gifts but show up to her birthday _party_ , I will pull what’s left of my hair out.” Clint tries to time rolling his eyes with Phil slamming the trunk, but he knows the second he’s finished that he’s been caught red-handed. “What?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing.”

“You’re making a face.”

“Y’know, Natasha says that too, but I’m pretty sure that’s just how my face looks.” Phil raises both his eyebrows in one fell swoop, and Clint sighs. He knows that look. He’s suffered in a thousand times by now: in court, during bickering arguments about leaving junk on the floor, in bed once or twice. It’s Phil’s _I’m not backing down right now_ look, the one that leaves no room for argument, and Clint finally throws up his hands. “You weren’t this bad before Steve bought you that comic thing for Secret Santa,” he finally points out, ‘cause it’s that or stand in the parking lot for the rest of his natural life.

Phil’s blandest expression flickers into place, but Clint knows it’s just one of his half-dozen lawyer masks. “I’m not ‘this bad,’” he says after a couple seconds. “I’m just sick of Tony’s whining.”

“Really?” Clint challenges. “And it has nothing to do with that comic book thing?” Phil holds his eyes, his face perfectly blank, and Clint purposely steps forward. One step, then two, then four, and then he’s right in front of Phil, their chests almost bumping. “You’re totally unaffected by Steve picking out the perfect nerd-gift?”

Phil’s jaw shifts. Anybody else in the world’d miss it. Hell, even Maria and Fury’d probably overlook it. But neither of them sleep in Phil’s bed, or sneak into his closing arguments to watch juries hang on his every word. 

None of them know Phil the way Clint knows him.

“It was the first issue of _The Walking Dead_ , signed for me by Robert Kirkman,” Phil finally replies. Clint breaks into the biggest grin imaginable, so big it almost hurts, and Phil purposely bumps their shoulders together as he heads toward the driver’s side. “Get in the car,” he instructs, as though Clint’ll miss the grin that’s edging into his voice.

“Dot’s about to have the _best_ fucking birthday,” Clint decides right then and there, and he’s not sure what’s better: the warmth of the May breeze as he pulls open the car door, or the fact that, as he does, Phil finally abandons the stoicism and laughs. 

 

==

 

“And that,” Pepper says, lifting her sangria glass in a loose toasting motion, “is when I knew I’d _never_ sleep with Tony.”

Laughter bubbles up around the circle, sparkling up into the night sky like the embers from when Tony laid another log on the fire. Stark’s built-in fire pit, nestled in the quietest corner of his backyard—far enough away that, with the kitchen lights off, the house is almost an illusion—reminds Clint of the stories Trick used to weave, sprawling tales of teenage misadventures and shooting squirrels with arrows to roast over a fire “just for kids.” To a kid who’d never ventured too far into the woods without his big brother and never after dark, Trick’s stories always felt like fairy tales, larger than life and kinda unbelievable. Even after Barney started shooting random animals with Trick’s crossbow—a squirrel, a couple slow rabbits, a stray cat who used to wander around the trailer park—Clint never quite believed that Trick and his buddies ever clumped around a fire and watched the stars.

Gathered around in a circle with his own friends, drinking beer and warming their feet, Clint kinda starts to think differently.

The extravaganza otherwise known as Dot’s fifth birthday party officially ended hours ago with the tuckered-out guest of honor falling asleep on the couch shortly after blowing out her candles. Miles’d offered to carry her up to one of the spare bedrooms to sleep off an afternoon of presets, swimming, dog-chasing, and ridiculous party games (“Pin the Eye Patch on Mister Fury” being her favorite), but the last Clint knew, Miles’d conked out with her. Nobody’d bothered waking the kids, though; instead, they’d broken out the adult beverages, dragged all the lawn chairs into the yard, and started a roaring fire.

Dummy rolls over, lands on Natasha’s foot, and immediately launches to his feet. Within seconds, Butterfingers is up too, and the dogs bolt out into the darkness of the yard, chasing one another in maniacal circles. Not far away, Tony mutters something—probably whole lot of cursing, but you can never be too sure about what comes outta the guy’s mouth—and Bruce’s laugh lines bunch up. In the flickering firelight, he looks about as happy as Clint’s ever seen him, and he can’t help but grin for a second.

Phil must catch him, though, ‘cause he brushes his fingers against the softest part of Clint’s wrist. Clint shivers for a second and tilts his head away like some embarrassed teenager. He blames it on the beer, the way his face flushes warm and cuts off his ability to swallow, but he knows without looking that Phil’s just smiling right back at him.

He hadn’t really talked to Phil during the party, not with the way everybody broke off into their separate factions and dove face-first into conversation. Phil’d ended up in a weird little gaggle with Maria, Peggy, and Jasper, discussing the county budget with a scary-high level of intensity until Jasper’d started forcing them to taste the different craft brews he’d brought to the party. Clint’d drifted by a few times, mostly to steal beers out of Phil’s hand and weigh in on whether he liked them, but the conversation stayed too rich for his blood.

Or maybe it was more that the conversation stayed on topics he hated, like politics and planned legislative initiatives. He liked Phil and everybody just fine, but no thanks.

He’d ended up drifting between a couple other groups, floating in and out of conversation like some kinda social chameleon. He’d weighed in on what artsy independent movie Darcy and Peter should take in the next morning—but smirking and answering, “None of them,” only earned him a glare and a smack from Darcy—he’d chatted with Pepper about an upcoming summer trip she and Natasha were maybe planning, and he’d laughed as Steve and Bucky tag-teamed on a story about Dot’s “birthday fairy.”

“And she’s purple,” Bucky’d sighed while Clint recovered from nearly choking on his drink. “Do you know how hard it is to find purple glitter to double as fairy dust? I almost called in the cavalry.”

“Meaning Darcy,” Steve’d clarified. He’d sparkled with one of his playful little smiles. He usually saved those for special occasions; watching Bucky squirm seemed to qualify. 

Bucky’d snatched Steve’s beer and helped himself to a gulp. “Hey, the woman knows her arts and crafts, which is more than I can say for us.”

“Why didn’t you just tell Dot that there’s no—” Steve’s eyebrows rocketed up in alarm, and Clint’d glanced over his shoulder just in time to catch Dot—wearing a purple bathing suit, blue flip-flops, and dripping from the pool—stealing a handful of pretzels from the snack table. He waited until she chased back after Miles to ask, “Why not just tell her there’s no birthday fairy?”

Steve’d flushed a funny color all of a sudden, some cross between pink and white, and Bucky’d huffed a sigh. “Because you don’t just tell a five-year-old that she’s created a mythical creature out of thin air,” he’d explained. Steve’d looked ready to retreat back into the trenches. “You create a long-term strategic plan to convince her there’s no such thing.”

“I just don’t want it to turn into another ‘magic Mister Valentine’ fiasco,” Steve’d replied. He’d lifted his beer back and clutched it between his hands. “She cried for two days.”

“Because you let her believe that a magical man broke into our house on Valentine’s Day to leave flowers and chocolate, Steve.”

“I didn’t _let_ her do anything. She came up with it on her own.”

“Yeah, and I was the one stuck buying gas station roses and M&Ms at five in the morning,” Bucky’d reminded him. Clint’d barely managed to stand on his laugh. “The guy at the Shell station still asks whether my wife forgave me for ‘whatever I did that one night.’”

“Hey, I remember that!” Tony’d cut in as he passed by. “That was awesome!”

Then and only then did Clint burst out laughing.

He’d moved through the crowd of usual suspects a little like a party ghost, checking in with Phil before drifting into his next chat. He’d teased Natasha about her pink toenails (and then ducked away before she could kick him), listened to Peter explain some complicated photo shoot the _Bugle_ planned to send him on in a couple weeks, and helped Bruce save the burgers from certain death.

“To be fair, the grill wasn’t that hot when this all started,” Tony’d defended. His _get to third base with the cook_ apron was covered in black ash, and something near the grill smelled vaguely of burnt hair.

“And you needed an entire bottle of lighter fluid to fix it?” Bruce’d asked. With Tony at their shoulders, it meant only Clint caught the amused little quirk to the corner of his mouth.

“It was that or patience, big guy, and I definitely don’t do patience.”

After the slightly-singed burgers—“Juicy on the inside, crispy on the outside!” Tony’d advertised, and Clint’d watched Jasper shudder from head to toe—and presents, Clint’d ended up standing in Thor and Jane’s group, watching as Jane played _hand off the baby to the nearest stranger_. Clint himself’d avoided the wriggling bundle of blonde chub, but he watched and laughed as Pepper, Peggy, and even Maria briefly tried her on for size. Astrid ended up cuddled against Bruce’s soft blue shirt while Thor’s booming voice explained her new tricks of smiling, laughing, and trying desperately to shove things in her seven-week-old mouth.

They’d all been laughing when Tony’d wandered past, paused, and backed up to stand next to Bruce. He’d eyed the baby, then the man holding her, and then the baby again. 

“You can’t have one,” he’d decided. Astrid chose that moment to stretch and yawn, and he’d jerked back like he thought she’d leap from Bruce’s arms to his. “Definitely can’t have one.”

Bruce’d sighed. “I don’t want a baby, Tony.”

“You say that now, sure,” Tony’d challenged. He’d leveled a finger at Bruce’s shoulder, and when Bruce’d rolled his eyes, he’d poked him. “But sooner or later, you’ll start imagining some fat little _thing_ with my eyes and my hair, and then—”

“Tony, I can barely handle one Stark. I don’t think I’d survive another one.” And while everybody else’d laughed, Clint’d watched as the two guys eyed each other for a second before breaking into grins and sharing a blink-and-you’d-miss-it kiss.

Ten minutes later, Darcy’d swept Astrid right out of Bruce’s grip and only handed her back to her parents when she’d started screaming.

But Jane, Thor, and the baby’d taken off right before cake, and the rest of them—Darcy, Peter, Maria, Peggy, and Jasper—took off right _after_ , leaving only a small fraction of the usual guard clustered around Stark’s fire pit. There’s Steve and Bucky, sipping beers and with their shoes abandoned somewhere in the yard with their bare feet wriggling in front of the fire, and Natasha and Pepper, chatting softly on the little wooden bench Stark keeps in the depths of his backyard. Tony steals Bruce’s coffee, sips it, and then hands it back, and Clint—

Clint glances over at Phil and smiles again, easy as anything.

They lapse into a comfortable silence, the kind you’d expect between friends, and Clint closes his eyes. He listens to the crackle of the fire and the occasional rush of a car down the street, soaking in the heat and the quiet.

He enjoys it for all of two minutes before Tony declares, “You people are boring.” When he cracks an eyelid, he sees that Tony’s stolen the coffee mug a second time and is gesturing with it. “I have a sleeping kid. I could be having truly filthy sex right now. Instead, I’m sitting here, listening to you people drink my beer and contemplate the meaning of life.”

“Technically,” Bucky points out, “I’m drinking Jasper’s beer.”

“Yeah, but Jasper brought it for _my_ party. Therefore, it’s my beer now, and—”

“Actually,” Pepper interrupts, “it’s Dot’s party, not—”

“Dot can’t drink beer, plus I hosted the party, so—”

“Really,” Natasha cuts in, “you _and_ Bruce are hosting the party.”

“It’s marital property, then!” Tony decides, throwing up a hand. He almost loses his grip on the damn coffee mug and everyone, including Bruce, laughs. “And you’re now all officially both pedantic _and_ boring.”

Next to Clint, Phil sighs. “Can’t we just enjoy one another’s company?” he asks.

Tony snaps his fingers. “Case in point,” he announces, and points at Phil until Bruce, shaking his head, wraps his hand around Tony’s fist and lowers his arm against his will. Good-natured bickering immediately breaks out, hardly audible over the crackle of the fire.

On Phil’s other side, Natasha shakes her head. “So much for marriage killing the romance,” she mutters. 

Clint laughs, but a couple chairs away, Steve raises an eyebrow. “You call this romance?”

Natasha rolls her eyes, undoubtedly considering some venomous comment about Steve’s naiveté, but Bucky cuts her off by raising his beer. “He’s right,” he offers. His husband tries very hard to balance his gratitude with his momentary smugness. “It’s not romance, it’s foreplay.”

Pepper nearly chokes on her sangria, and even Phil—placid and unflappable, even as Tony and Bruce move onto some argument about a _Scientific American_ article—loses himself to easy, open laughter.

Natasha and Bucky toast one another across the fire and finish off their respective beers.

They head home a little after midnight, leaving behind the glowing embers of the fire but carrying the warmth of a lot of laughter with them. Clint swears he’s sore from smiling, especially when, halfway through their drive home, Bruce texts around a picture of Tony wearing a bright pink party hat. It’s obviously from hours earlier—the sun’s still out and Dot’s hanging off her godfather like some kinda little blonde barnacle—but man, it’s the greatest blackmail Clint’s ever seen.

When he shows Phil at a stop light, Phil snorts a laugh. “He’ll have an excuse for that by Monday,” he points out.

“And I’ll have it programmed as his caller ID photo on _both_ our phones by tomorrow,” Clint retorts. When Phil rolls his eyes, Clint leans over, maneuvers Phil’s phone outta his pocket, and sets to work.

Once they’re back in the house, armed with freshly-reprogramed phones and a kitten who climbs up Clint’s jeans a greeting, Phil’s text chime rings. “Damage control already?” Clint asks as he drops Sandy on the floor near her food bowl and follows his guy through to the bedroom.

Phil’s already opening his pants, one hand clutching his phone. “It’s Nick,” he replies. Clint almost comments about how creepy it is that anybody’s on a first-name basis with their boss, but he stops when he catches the dark lines creasing the corners of Phil’s mouth. He watches Phil sit heavily on the edge of the bed.

“Everything okay?”

“I’m not sure,” Phil returns, and starts composing a reply.

“As long as there aren’t any dead kids in the woods,” Clint jokes in an attempt to chase away Phil’s frown. He drops his jeans onto the floor and leaves them there, waiting for Phil to start bitching about hampers or some shit. Instead, Phil reaches for his glasses, perches the on his nose, and squints at his phone again. Clint kicks his jeans toward the hamper. “ _Is_ there a dead kid in the woods?”

“No,” Phil answers quickly. He shakes his head, one efficient snap, without ever looking up. Clint expects he’ll thumb his way through another reply, but instead, he locks his phone and leaves it on the bedside table. “It seems the cops managed to arrest some of the teenagers involved in that house party a couple weeks ago.”

Clint frowns at him. “And he texted you about it at twelve-thirty on a Saturday?”

“Apparently.” He waits for more information—Phil’s a master at leaving a couple blanks and then slowly filling them in, after all—but instead, the guy strips out of his glasses and then, out of his t-shirt. When he stands to lose his pants, he pauses, and Clint follows the way his eyes track every inch of him. Heat he can’t blame on the beer pools in his belly. 

“Like what you see?” he asks. He cocks his hip a couple inches, coaxing an exasperated eye-roll outta Phil. “‘Cause you can do more than window shop, if you’re interested.”

“Oh, I know,” Phil promises, and promptly drops his jeans.

 

==

 

“It’s kind of charming,” Bucky comments, leaning heavily on the conference room table. Natasha rolls her eyes and stabs her fork into her scone, but next to her, Pepper rolls her lips together to keep from laughing. “I mean, it works with the goatee, am I right?”

Pepper covers her mouth for a second, but the smile settles around her eyes. Clint finally understands why Tony spent a couple months wanting to bang her before deciding she’d make a better lifelong friend. “I can’t decide if it’s charming or terrible,” she replies. “But the glittery fringe is a nice touch.”

“It really depends on whether it’s a sex thing,” Darcy chimes in, slurping her enormous mocha drink through a bright purple twisty straw. She’d almost snorted the frappe-whatever out of her nose when Bucky’d showed her the party hat picture, but she’s since retreated into cool aloofness. Clint blames the fact that the other interns all wandered into the conference room, legal pads in hand. Darcy’s officially too cool for those “dorks.” Her word, too, which is kinda funny from a girl who wears Doctor Who jewelry on a regular basis. “Because you know Tony. It could totally be a sex thing.”

Bucky glances down at his cell phone, a slow-burn look of horror crossing his face. “Oh god,” he says, swiftly putting the offending phone down on the table and backing up a half-step. “Don’t let my daughter’s party hat be a sex thing.”

Across the table, Bruce glances up from his crossword puzzle. “You assume I don’t have better things for him to wear in bed,” he comments.

For a brief moment, the entire conference room falls funeral-parlor quiet. Even the interns close their chattering mouths and stare at the quiet man across the room.

Bruce shrugs and returns to the newspaper. 

“Okay, _ew_ ,” Darcy declares, and her whole-body shudder sets off a weird domino effect of laughter.

They’re still chuckling when the door swings open and the second clump of attorneys walk in, most of them still weighed down with case files or, in Thor’s case, a massive roast beef sandwich that he must’ve picked up on his way back from the house. Tuesday afternoon staff meetings are pretty much unheard of—Fury likes to cram everything into a two-hour Monday morning marathon before sending them on their way for the rest of the week—and this one has managed to screw with everybody’s schedules. Clint knows for a fact that Natasha cancelled a couple plea negotiation meetings, that Bucky’d harassed a judicial assistant into bumping his hearing back an hour, and that Judge English’d spent the morning docket on the warpath. Granted, he’s not totally sure that the judge wasn’t just in a pissed-off mood for the hell of it, but either way, the tension in the room’s pretty heavy. Even Phil looks harried and harassed as he drops into the chair beside Clint.

Clint pushes over the cup of coffee he’d nabbed on his way to the conference room. “You look like hell,” he comments. Across the table, Darcy leans over to steal a pickle off Thor’s sandwich and loudly ask about Astrid. Clint swears to god he’s gonna sit her down and talk to her about proper intern protocol, one of these days.

Or he’ll make Phil do it.

Phil breathes in the sweet scent of Stark’s expensive coffee for a minute before he shakes his head. “I’m prosecuting three different robberies against three different defense attorneys. I’m starting to forget which is which.”

Clint grins. “You can usually tell Sif apart because of her—”

“I will stab you with a pen,” Natasha says from a few seats down. She’s flipping through the local bar association journal and is definitely _not_ paying any attention to Clint.

He snorts a laugh at her and leans back in his chair. “You have no idea what I was going to say.”

“Everyone knows what you were going to say,” Bucky informs him as he finally drops into a chair. He tosses his phone and portfolio onto the table. “Some of us just wanted to hear you— Hey!”

“You deserved that,” Steve announces, and leaves Bucky to flatten down his rumpled hair as he settles into the seat beside him.

Clint laughs at the two of them—hard not to, given that they’ve spent most their adult lives married to each other and still sometimes screw around like handsy teenagers in love—and finally feels some of the tension leak out of his body. His morning’s been jam-packed with hearings, ranging from a two-hour long speeding trial to three different sentencing hearings, and his afternoon promises a lot of the same. During the one plea bargain of the morning, English raked him over the coals for a sloppy recitation of the facts; during a quick-and-dirty status conference, he reached for a pen and spilled water on counsel table. Tuesdays’ve always been his busiest day of the week, but right now, they feel like the seventh circle of hell.

The mysterious after-lunch staff meeting is definitely not helping.

The door opens again and Peggy and Hill file in, talking loudly about an upcoming rape case that’s almost definitely proceeding to trial. The clump of three interns jerks, all of them sitting up ramrod straight as Hill walks in front of them; across the table, Darcy huffs and rolls her eyes. Clint realizes for the first time that she’s scooted her chair as far away from the gaggle as possible. Any further and she’d need to drag her chair out into the hallway and spy on the meeting through the open conference room door. He tries to catch her attention, but she’s busily discussing complicated charging procedure with Steve and flashing the world shark-toothed grins.

“Think we made a mistake letting her in the courtroom?” Clint asks Phil under his breath.

Phil snorts and shakes his head. “I think she’s going to eat the other interns for breakfast,” he replies, and buries his nose back into his coffee. 

Clint’s about ready to shoot back about which one Darcy’d start with when Hill, sitting at the far head of the table, asks, “Where the hell is Stark?”

Then, the retort drops into silence. Not just Clint’s own silence, either, but the shared silence of a dozen-plus people realizing that one of their own is missing in action.

“Fury called him in half an hour ago,” Bruce says. To anybody else, his voice’d sound completely calm and even, but Clint’s known the guy for a year. He catches the little edge of worry to it, the tightness that sits in the back of his throat. Nobody, least of all Clint, needs to remind the guy about the last unplanned staff meeting that saw Stark showing up late.

Not that it stops Clint’s gut from twisting itself into a tight ball of nerves anyway.

“To be fair,” Phil replies after a couple of beats, his coffee mug settling heavily on the table, “Fury could have called him in for his colorful use of the word _shenanigans_ in one of last month’s appeals.”

Maria rolls her eyes. “He did not use the word shenanigans,” she returns. She crosses her arms under her breasts as though that’ll prove her point. 

“Actually, I used the phrase _egregiously overblown shenanigans_ , and that was after I decided to show restraint.” Clint glances over just in time to watch Tony glide into the room, all showy suit and extra-shiny tie. He drapes his jacket over the back of the chair next to Bruce before dropping comfortably into it and immediately loosening his tie. “I miss anything good? We starting a betting pool on which intern hooks up with which other intern when?”

The dark-haired male intern—the only male intern this year, actually—raises his hand slightly. “We’re right here,” he points out.

“Shh, the grown-ups are talking,” Tony replies. The whole room’s still intensely quiet with most people still focused on Tony, though, so he stops rolling up his sleeves and glances around at all of them. Clint suspects it’s maybe for show. “What?”

“You were in with Fury?” Peggy asks. Clint thinks sometimes that she, Pepper, and Bruce are the only three people in the world who’re totally immune to Stark’s crazy dramatics.

“For purely clerical reasons, yeah,” Tony replies. He flicks the edge of his newly rolled-up cuff before glancing back around the room. “No, really, clerical reasons that have absolutely no long-term importance on anyone’s life,” he stresses, holding up his hands. He waves them around a little, like he’s creating a force field between him and everyone’s concern. “Nobody died, nobody’s seriously hurt, there’re no crazy homicidal advertising executives out murdering people—”

Bruce sighs. “Tony.”

“Hey, I’m just saying. It’s like that that Panic! at the Disco song: nobody moved and nobody got hurt.” The pretty blonde girl intern giggles lightly, and Tony snaps a finger at her and winks like some sort of two-bit celebrity. It loosens the heaviness that’s washed over the room; once Natasha rolls her eyes and mutters something that sounds suspiciously like _drama queen_ , the transformation’s complete. Quiet conversation starts to burble up around the table, and Phil finally picks up and sips his coffee.

But Clint watches as Tony leans over and says something to Bruce, and then, as Bruce’s whole expression tightens a half degree. Tony squeezes his arm, plants the world’s quickest kiss on his jaw, and steals the crossword puzzle. Bruce sighs and rolls his eyes, but the tension’s still pulling the corners of his mouth down.

“A good appellate attorney always knows how to shape a story to his advantage,” Phil says. He slides his mug over to Clint, and Clint discovers that there’s still an inch or so of coffee left in the bottom. He snorts and helps himself to a hungry swallow. “It’s technically good advocacy.”

“And technically a lie,” Clint returns.

“Technically,” Phil agrees, and brushes his knuckles along the back of Clint’s hand before he retrieves his mug.

Fury enters the room a few seconds later in a cloud of black suit jacket and darker mood. Pepper stands to shut the door behind him, but the heavy sound is cut off by Fury tossing a thick manila folder down onto the table. He stands in the front of the room, about as imposing as Clint’s ever seen him, and lets out a frustrated growl of a sigh. “As of this weekend,” he announces, “we’ve landed ourselves a fucking nightmare set of juvenile offender cases that are about to make our lives a living hell.”

The room falls silent except for the occasional sound of somebody sucking in a breath through their nose, and Fury let them sit that way, still as statues and twice as solemn, before he opens his mouth again. “Any of you hear the big news story a couple weeks back?” he asks. His attention wanders around the room, studying every face for a couple seconds before moving onto the next. A couple people shrug noncommittally, and Clint thinks maybe Steve nods, but everybody else kinda keeps their heads down. “Really, people?” Fury presses. “A two-hundred kid house party gets busted ‘cause of a fight-club style brawl? Took four squad cars to sort it all out?” Clint watches as Darcy starts tracing the loop in her curly straw. “Please do _not_ tell me that I’m the only person in this room who watches the goddamn evening news!”

“We watch it when I’m _on_ it,” Tony offers suddenly. Clint’s almost positive that the guy knows what Fury’s talking about—“clerical purposes” or not, there’s something about his body language that makes Clint think he’s way inside the loop on this one—but he still tosses out the one-liner and lets everybody groan. “What? I need to know which stations’ cameras add ten pounds so I can never do interviews with them again, and the best judge of that’s the guy who sees me naked on a regular basis.”

“You’re making a compelling argument for me never seeing you naked again,” Bruce mutters without glancing up from the crossword puzzle. For the first time since Tony strode into the room, Clint catches the hint of a smile that crinkles the corners of the guy’s eyes.

Tony must catch it, too, ‘cause he cracks an award-wining Stark-style grin. “You’d make it two days, Banner, and you know it.”

“Save the flirting for a place where I don’t have to watch it, Stark,” Fury snaps, and that drags everybody’s attention back over in his direction. He reaches out and flips open the folder he’d dropped in the middle of the table a couple minutes earlier, and Clint can tell that it’s filled with a pile of newspaper clippings. For a guy who bitches about nobody watching the news, he sure showed up prepared to brief them _about_ the news they missed. He hands off a couple of the clippings to Natasha, who scowls at them before passing them over to Pepper. 

“A bunch of dumbass kids from Holy Trinity Preparatory Academy decided to throw a house party about two weeks back,” he explains, gesturing toward the clippings. Pepper’s face crumples slowly as she reads, her eyebrows knotting together in a sort of razor-sharp distaste. “Damn thing turned into a who’s who of spoiled rich kids from all over the area. And before anybody knew what the hell was happening, one of the guests decided to beat the shit outta five of the host’s closest friends.” Fury shakes his head. “Long story short, the host called the cops, the cops busted out the party, and this past Saturday night, they rounded up and arrested as many of the little shits as they could get their hands on.”

“How many?” Maria asks from the end of the table.

“Seven,” he answers. In her intern-free corner, Darcy lets out a low whistle. “Now, most of them aren’t gonna be a problem,” he continues. His hands fall from his hips and land on the tabletop, and he leans it like he’s about to share a secret. Out of the corner of his eye, Clint notices the boy intern leaning in too, ready to soak up everything he can. Phil must catch him in the act, too, because he smirks around the lip of his coffee mug. “We’ve got a couple college-aged kids who’ll get slammed for providing alcohol to minors, somebody had pot on him, those sorts of charges. Nothing you wouldn’t expect from your run-of-the-mill rich kids who got bored and were looking to kill some time on their Saturday night. Most of ‘em will plead out before the ink on the charging statements dries.” He pauses there for a second, and Clint swears he can feel the tension in the room grow and thicken like a dense fog. He glances over at Phil, who spins his empty coffee mug between two fingers; the newspaper clipping lands in front of him, and he looks down at the _Massive House Party Interrupted by Police_ headline without really processing it. “But then, we’ve got the instigator, the one who started the fight that led the cops there in the first place. Because that one kicked the shit outta these boys enough to land five counts of assault and battery. Maybe even aggravated battery, because at least one of the victims said something about a broken beer bottle and a busted up nose.” He shakes his head again. “It’s gonna take a little while to sort it all out, but it’s pretty bad.”

Near the end of the table, Bucky lets out a snort and shakes his head. “Sounds like a little hell-raiser,” he decides. Steve flashes him an annoyed glance. “What? I can’t call it like I see it? Because if some teenager goes around beating the shit out of his buddies, he deserves the label.”

Clint passes Phil the newspaper clipping as Fury straightens up and places his hands on his hips. “She,” he says, and Bucky stops eye-bickering with his husband to jerk his head toward the front of the room. “The kid who beat the stuffing out of five high-school senior basketball players is a sixteen-year-old girl.”

Darcy chokes on her coffee drink so hard that Clint expects it to shoot out her nose. Phil’s head snaps up from the newspaper clippings to stare, surprised, at Fury. He’s joined by just about everybody else, save for Bruce and Stark (further proof Stark knows what the hell’s actually going on), and for a couple beats of silence, they all gape at their boss.

It’s Pepper who finally asks, “Is she okay?”

“She who? The little banshee who caused all this trouble? ‘Cause she’s fine and ready with one of the best lawyers money can buy to try to get outta this mess, thanks for asking.” Pepper frowns a little at Fury’s sarcasm but the guy ignores it to reach up and massage his temple. “The boys, the ones with the various other charges, I’m not too worried about,” he continues once he’s dropped his hand back to his side. “They’re all new to this office. We’ve checked them out a couple dozen times in the last day and a half, just to be sure. I think one of the older ones got picked up for joyriding back when all he had was a learner’s permit, but otherwise, they’re upstanding citizens who’ll probably never land themselves in court again.” He glances across the room to the end of the table. “Barnes, you’ll handle the two who’re over twenty-one and who, far as we can tell, helped supply the kegs. And Thor, I expect you’ll take on the ones who aren’t _quite_ old enough to know that the law’s not optional just ‘cause Daddy’s got cash to burn.”

“Aye,” Thor answers without glancing up from the newspaper clipping. His jaw’s set in a hard, serious line, and Clint wonders for the first time how much cases like this bother him. He’s great with screwed-up teenagers who break into cars or show up at school with knives shoved in his boots—hell, half the time, he coaxes laughter outta them, if you can believe it—but Clint thinks maybe rich brats are a little outside his comfort zone. “Hopefully, we can keep them from returning to this office.”

“That’s the dream,” Fury responds, but it’s humorless. He raps his knuckles on the table for a second, almost like he’s working his way up to the next part of the conversation. “Our little Miss Street Fighter, though, is a whole different story.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” Maria asks. It’s the role she almost always plays in meetings like this, the human teleprompter to whatever speech Fury needs to meander through. She’s still leaning far back in her seat, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. “She bites if provoked?”

“She doesn’t, but her daddy might.” Fury flips the folder shut and surveys the room, his eye sweeping steadily from one face to the next until he’s completed the full rounds. “And by ‘bite,’ I mean ‘hire the best attorney in the state to ream our asses if we mismanage his precious daughter’s case.”

“Dare I ask who ‘Daddy’ is?” Phil chimes in. There’s something serious and drawn on his face, an expression Clint mostly knows from their long hours during the Killgrave case.

“Derek Bishop: publishing mogul, decent guy, and litigious as hell.” Fury lets out a sound that’s kinda reminiscent of a sigh and shakes his head again. Clint thinks for a second that the guy must have one hell of a headache. But the thought passes when Clint realizes that the name _Bishop_ sounds more than a little familiar. It drums up a nervousness in the softest part of his belly, like the churning start of a deep-sea storm. “Most of you might not remember this, but his business is where Jordan Silva-Riberio started out back before Killgrave decided that his fifteen years on this planet was fifteen too many.”

“And _that_ ,” Tony interrupts, pointing in Fury’s direction, “is why he dragged me down into the seventh circle of hell before this meeting. I had to confirm that Bishop was still on the Urban Ascent roster. I mean, I figured it could go either way, what with us dragging all his interns into this office last year and grilling them like quality ribeye steaks.”

“Ribeye steaks,” Steve repeats. His jaw’s tight, a sure sign that he’s in no mood for Tony’s usual irreverence. Honestly, Clint’s not in a mood for it either, but his stomach’s still twisting around under his shirt and tie.

Tony rolls his eyes. “What, you prefer New York strips?” he asks. He looks ready for a fight until Bruce’s hand shifts under the table; then, he settles in place, still and quiet. Clint remembers for a second how wound up Tony got the last time his charity ended up in the hot seat. He wonders how much of the roster-checking included Obadiah Stane and agitated swearing.

Fury raises a hand. “This has nothing to do with Urban Ascent or any of Bishop’s summer program kids: past, present, or future,” he says, effectively ending whatever Stark-Rogers argument is brewing just below the surface of the conversation. “And I don’t have to remind any of you that last summer, when we were putting together the case against Killgrave, Bishop was incredibly cooperative.”

“Aside from the part where he threatened to sue us if we stepped one hair out of line,” Maria mutters under her breath. Her shoulders are squared off, almost ready for a fight.

“Except that,” Fury admits. “But the man runs more newspapers and magazines than I can count on my two hands. The fact that he brought those kids in without a subpoena and let Barton talk with them is a lot more than I expected to get when we called him up.” He crosses his arms and looks across the table. “This time, though, with his daughter on our doorstep, I’m not sure what’s gonna happen. Which is why I’m saying that, from this moment on, it’s kid gloves all the way around. No snide comments, no pushing the envelope, and no running your mouth without a filter.”

His eye narrows in on Stark with that last one, and the guy promptly tosses his head like a stubborn teenager. Bruce, on the other hand, forces a little smile. “We’ll work on the filter part,” he promises.

Tony scoffs at him. “You know, I’m starting to think you slipped in a _to agree with everybody else about my proclivities and to hold_ into our vows, because I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to defend me against these kinds of personality attacks, not—”

“Who’s handling the case?” Maria interrupts. Tony rolls his eyes at being cut off, but he at least shuts up for a second. Clint’s pretty sure the rant about dispersions on his character and traitorous spouses’ll just pick up after the meeting, but at least he won’t need to listen to it.

“And that’s part two of the problem,” Fury replies. He scans the room again, and Clint feels for a second like he’s on stage during one of those televised talent shows, about to be judged by a cranky British judge. He thinks back to the interviews last fall, all those kids clumped around the table and talking about Bishop’s pretty daughter—and then, the girl in the plaid skirt with the hair that kept blowing in her face. He’s trying to remember what she looked like beyond the dark hair and the school uniform when he realizes that Fury’s still talking. “Since all signs point to the fact that Laufeyson’s firm is going to swoop in with a civil suit against her by one of her victims, I want Thor as far away from this case as we can keep him,” he explains, and Clint fights the curdled-milk feeling that rises in his stomach at the thought of Loki Laufeyson even setting foot back in the courthouse. “And until this felony backlog’s cleared out, I need all my other hands on deck helping Hill and Coulson out.”

“I could do it,” Bruce offers, raising his pen slightly. “I know I’m on the Urban Ascent board, but I’m not that involved in charity’s inner workings, and—”

Fury shakes his head. “You sleep in Stark’s bed. That’s involved enough for this office.” Clint watches as a tiny smirk crosses Tony’s face. “I think the best plan’ll be to have Romanoff and Barton flip for it, unless Rogers, you want to—”

“I’ll do it,” Clint hears himself say, his voice almost foreign to his own ears. Fury stops talking to stare at him, and a second later, he realizes the whole rest of the room’s staring too. He runs his fingers through his hair for a second before he shrugs. “I’m not involved with Urban Ascent, I’ve got no skeletons in my closet that’ll bump me from the case, and I probably won’t stick my foot too far in my mouth.”

“If that was a jab, I’m offended,” Tony notes.

Clint snorts a little at him before he turns to Fury. The guy’s watching him with this eerie level of attention, the kind that makes Clint’s skin crawl and his collar feel about an inch too tight. “Besides,” he adds after a couple seconds, “I’ve met Bishop’s daughter. Might make it easier to settle this without a trial.”

He tries to drop it out there like a simple statement of fact—after all, he _did_ meet the kid back last fall, and he’s pretty sure she’ll remember him and his supposedly tight pants—but he realizes as soon as the words’ve left his lips that he’s said the wrong thing. ‘Cause Phil glances down at his mug an instant before Fury’s expression transitions from surprise to a glare.

Clint flinches in anticipation.

“You talked to this kid back during the Killgrave trial and never thought to say anything to anybody about it?” Fury demands, and Clint rolls his lips together to keep from jerking back like he’s been shot. “You had a conversation with the daughter of a guy who threatened to—and I quote—‘sue us back into the Middle Ages’ if we bothered her and you never thought to mention it to a single other human being?”

“I, uh, mentioned it to Phil,” Clint says dumbly. His thumb sorta jerks in Phil’s direction, too, which is probably the wrong call. Fury’s flash of anger deepens in that instant, and Clint knows beyond a doubt that he’s landed Phil in a heap of trouble. “But I didn’t know Bishop said we couldn’t talk to her. She just showed up one day, and we had talked for five minutes. That was it.”

He watches as Fury’s jaw works, flexing and then setting in a tight line. “You think you built a rapport with her?”

“Sir?”

“You and the little hell-raiser. You think you built up a rapport with her? That she might listen to you even if Daddy won’t?”

Clint ignores the smug little sound that Bucky makes at the term _hell-raiser_ and presses his lips together. When he nods, he swears that he can feel his pulse in his neck. “I think she’ll remember me and maybe won’t try to play me off against her dad, sure,” he answers. Fury never blinks away from him. “I mean, I’ve got as good a chance as anyone, right?”

A couple tense, silent questions roll by before Fury finally nods. “Don’t fuck it up,” he says curtly, and Clint lets out a breath that he’s not sure he remembers holding. “Girl might be a sixteen-year-old in a plaid skirt, but she kicked the shit outta five teenage boys and walked away without much more than a scratch.”

Natasha snorts. “Sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” she comments, glancing over at Clint.

And Clint, for the first time since the conversation started, chuckles as he rolls his eyes. “She’s a teenage girl,” he replies, lifting his shoulders in a shrug. “How hard could it be?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since I'm not sure how many folks realize that The Cardboard Hedgehog is now a regular feature, I will repeat two notes from last Friday:
> 
> The most recent MPU posting schedule can be found [here](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/66887534008/cbhh-is-the-cardboard-hedgehog-and-other). I forgot an installment of Cardboard Hedgehog when I wrote it, so there will be a minor change at some point, but is otherwise accurate.
> 
> Did you know that my good friend HAP wrote an MPU story? It's called [Pride Goeth](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1044739), and if you haven't read it, you need to wet yourself over it like I frequently do.


	3. First Appearances

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, Clint meets his match in the teenage defendant he’s meant to prosecute and realizes his work just might be cut out for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most states require that a juvenile have both a parent and an attorney present during proceedings. I am not certain that a stand-in parent or a stand-in attorney would be permitted in reality, but I enjoy living in the land of fiction. 
> 
> Thanks as always to Jen and saranoh, who probably forgot how ridiculous my courtroom scenes tend to be. At least, until now.

“Oh, go to hell,” Kate Bishop sneers, and throws her hair over her shoulder.

The juvenile courtroom is silent as a tomb and mostly empty, except for Kate, her lawyer, and of course, Clint. He tries to leave the two of them alone—they’re meeting for the first time, Kate and her lawyer, and the only reason he’s in the courtroom at all is to drop his stuff off at counsel table—but it’s hard to ignore the huge waves of tension rolling off them. He focuses on the brightly-colored mural on the wall as he digs his pens out of the bottom of his bag, bound and determined to stay out of their conversation.

“Miss Bishop,” the lawyer presses.

“Shut up,” the girl retorts. A high-pitched scratching sound follows, and Clint jerks his head up just in time to watch Kate scoot her chair as far away from her attorney as the table will allow. She knocks the crappy fake vinyl chair into the table leg hard enough that she rattles the whole thing, and then crosses her arms over her chest.

Her attorney sighs. Clint’s never seen the guy around the courthouse before, and trust him, he definitely would’ve noticed. He’s dressed like a gangster out of a shitty movie about 1920s Chicago: his suit’s dark charcoal and pinstriped, his tie and pocket square match perfectly, and his shoes shine like wing-tipped mirrors. Worse, his too-black hair’s slicked back with way too much gel, a perfectly-combed oil slick that sits atop his head. Clint thinks of Dot Barnes’s Ken dolls and their plastic-ridged hair, and he tries not to grin.

He figures that lawyers like this guy, all shiny and freshly-pressed, are sold in bulk. If you need one for a court case, you just pop him out of his plastic blister pack, set him down on the courthouse steps, and watch him go.

The lawyer slides a legal pad across the table. There’s an expensive pen in the middle of it. Clint wonders whether it counts as an olive branch.

Kate grabs the pen, untwisting the cap in one deft motion. Before Clint can really track her, she’s grabbed the legal pad and started methodically coloring in the corner of the first sheet. Her oil-slick attorney rolls his lips together, almost as though he plans on saying something, but then Kate raises her head. Her eyes flash, and the attorney flips his file open.

Okay, then.

Clint remembers Mr. Bishop’s pretty daughter from last fall, the teenager with the soft, dark hair and the smart, too-quick smile. He’d watched the wind toss her hair behind her shoulders and lap at the hem of her school uniform, and he’d listened to her sharp tongue rattle off witty one-liners that belonged to somebody twice her age. A year ago, she’d managed to be both fifteen and twenty-five, a clever girl who maybe’d never been treated like a _girl_ at all.

Today, though, she’s different. Clint watches her from across the well of the courtroom, her long ponytail brushing against the back of her chair as her pen strokes spread across the page. She’s dressed in a skirt and button-down blouse, a far cry from the traditional battle garb of a criminal defendant, but with the ponytail and a bare, makeup-free face, she almost looks like a twelve-year-old playing dress-up. The longer she stares at the legal pad, the longer Clint can study her face. The pink, wild-fire flush of anger recedes slowly, even as she grips her pen with a white-knuckled rage.

The attorney glances in Clint’s direction suddenly, and he jerks his attention away from Kate to force a small smile. He aims for sympathetic—he’s occasionally won points with the attorneys of difficult defendants by playing the old “sorry your client’s a dick, wink wink” card—but the oil-slick’s whole face tenses. Clint can’t decide whether it’s because he’d worked too hard on the smile or because the guy’s embarrassed about how hard he’s struggling to control a sixteen-year-old. 

He swivels his chair back toward his client. Clint drops his gaze to his folder. 

“Kate,” the guy says, more sharply.

“Fuck off,” Kate snaps back, and the guy snaps his flawless mouth shut.

Clint bites down on the edges of his smile and forces himself to stare at the charging document that’s clipped to the inside cover of Kate’s file. Steve’s scribbled down a couple notes about how juvenile offender cases are different from the ones Clint’s used to: weird time limits on everything, different titles for the case and the defendant, a whole slew of confidentiality rules that Clint needs to memorize (at least, according to Steve). He’s still skimming the bright blue post-it when the secure door to the judge’s chambers opens up and Judge Smithe herself asks them all to rise.

Clint never sat down, but the shiny attorney rises smoothly from his chair. Kate drops the legal pad on the table and pulls herself up like it’s the greatest imposition in the history of humankind. Clint’s starting to think the girl’s suffered a lobotomy or something.

“You may be seated,” the judge informs them once she’s settled into her seat and brushed her thick braid back over her shoulder, and Kate drops into her own chair like she’s a sack of flour. Judge Smithe jerks her head up and shoots the girl a razor-sharp look; after a moment of teenage posturing, Kate uncrosses her arms and sits up straight. It’s the first sign of the girl from last September that Clint’s noticed in the last ten minutes. “We’re here in case number 13-0097JO, the State versus K.E.B., a juvenile born in 1996. Appearances, please?”

“The State appears by Assistant District Attorney Clinton Barton, your honor,” Clint says. 

He watches the corner of the judge’s mouth twist up in a tiny grin. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you in my courtroom, Mister Barton.”

“Mister Odinson had a conflict,” Clint explains, but he knows from the way Smithe glances at him over her glasses that she means something entirely different. He holds his own grin at bay, but only by the skin of his teeth. 

The slicked-back attorney at the other table offers a look of bare-faced confusion. It only lasts a half-second, but Clint reads it like a book. He’s fresh out of the blister pack, all right. “Tanner Sullivan of Cramer and March appears in person with the defendant, Katherine Elizabeth Bishop.”

“The juvenile,” Judge Smithe says without missing a beat. Still seated in her chair, Kate snorts quietly. Tanner Sullivan raises both black eyebrows. “We don’t call juveniles ‘defendants,’ Mister Sullivan. We call them ‘juveniles.’”

“I, uh, apologize,” Sullivan responds. He shifts his weight slightly. Clint swears he can see the plastic cracking. “I don’t usually handle this type of work.”

“No kidding,” Kate deadpans. Whether it’s meant to be under her breath, Clint’s not exactly sure, but the judge clearly hears. She levels a second warning glance in the girl’s direction, and Kate straightens up another few degrees. 

“We’ll try to help you out with that, Mister Sullivan,” Smithe says pleasantly enough. “And Mister Bishop is—”

“Out of the country, your honor,” Sullivan answers quickly. Smithe stops flipping open her file to blink at the guy. Clint actually feels bad for him, the way he stares up at the woman like he’s never set foot in a courtroom before. He fidgets slightly, tugging at his collar. “He was supposed to send Miss Bishop’s mother, H—”

“Step-mother,” Kate corrects sharply.

Sullivan grimaces. “Step-mother,” he amends. He shifts his weight again. It reminds Clint of Dot Barnes’s potty dance. “Whatever the case, she was unavailable, as well. I believe Miss Bishop’s therapist is on her way, but she needed to be in court in Union County and is running a bit behind schedule.”

The smile that materializes on Judge Smithe’s face is tight and humorless, but it attempts to reach her eyes, anyway. “Mister Sullivan,” she says carefully, every word annunciated within an inch of her life, “in order to proceed with your client’s first appearance, we need either her parent or someone who is authorized to act in the place of her parent. If that is her therapist—”

“It is,” Sullivan interjects quickly.

“—then we need to wait for her to arrive. We can’t proceed without her.”

“Even if my client intends to plead not—”

“I didn’t tell you what I intend to plead, _Tanner_ ,” Kate interrupts. Sullivan’s whole face pinches like he’s licked a lemon. He twists in Kate’s direction, probably ready to shut her up, but the girl’s on her feet within seconds. She’s wearing a pair of ludicrously tall high-heels. Clint’s pretty sure Pepper owns the same pair in beige. “Your honor, I don’t want Tanner to be my attorney. I want a different one.”

“ _What_?” Sullivan sputters. His face flares bright red as he leans toward his client. Clint thinks he can see the guy’s pulse in his neck. “Kate, I swear to god—”

“Just because you went to high school with Heather doesn’t mean you to get to boss me around like you’re some long-lost uncle,” Kate snaps. Clint bites the inside of his cheek and glances at his file, because it’s either that or allowing a grin to overtake his entire face. “The rule is that I get an attorney no matter what, right? Well, I don’t want this one anymore.”

“Kate,” Sullivan presses, “this is not the time to be a petty little—”

“I would suggest not finishing that sentence, Mister Sullivan,” Judge Smithe cuts in. Her voice is a perfectly-honed venomous blade that slices cleanly across the courtroom, and Clint jerks his head up. He expects to read anger on her usually-calm face, but what he sees instead is something tighter. It’s not quite frustration, but his blood runs ice cold anyway. He rolls his lips together while Sullivan shuffles from foot to foot. “You might as well sit down before you say something you regret.” When the attorney and his client start to sink back in their seats, however, Smithe adds, “Not you, Miss Bishop.”

Without Sullivan in the way, Clint catches his first full glimpse of the girl’s face. There’re no outward signs of the fight from a couple weeks back, no lingering bruises or scars that prove just how poorly the party ended. Instead, the girl looks gaunt and tired, like she’d run a marathon before shoving on her My First Business Suit and heading into the courtroom. The shirt and skirt don’t quite fit right—the shirt’s meant for a woman with a few more curves, and the skirt hits her knees at a funny angle—and dark circles rim her eyes. Sharp tongue or not, she looks like somebody’s lost little girl.

Clint doesn’t bother fighting against his frown. He watches as Kate wraps one hand around the other, and realizes a second too late that even if her face is unblemished, there are scabs on her knuckles. 

Judge Smithe leans back in her chair, her careful eyes sweeping slowly over the girl. “You’re right that you get a lawyer,” she says finally. Her tone is almost too even. “However, there’s no court-appointed counsel for people who can afford to hire their own. Mister Sullivan has been retained by your father. Until you and your father hire someone else, he will represent your interests in this case.”

“I don’t want some lackey my dad’s wife hired,” Kate returns. Her fingers dig into the soft underside of her wrist, and Clint watches her hand shake from the effort. “This is my case. I’m sixteen. That has to matter for something.”

“Until you’re eighteen, removed from the home for child welfare reasons, or legally emancipated, it unfortunately doesn’t,” Smithe replies. The thread of calm in her voice is starting to fray. “I’d suggest you make peace with that.”

Kate shakes her head. “No. If I can’t have a different lawyer, then we can all just sit here and stare at each bother, because I’m not going to talk to Tanner. “

“Mister Sullivan,” her attorney corrects in a low hiss.

“Just because you want to sleep with Heather does _not_ mean I’m going to—”

“Enough!” 

Judge Smithe’s voice cracks across the courtroom like a thunderclap seconds before a torrential downpour. Kate flinches back a couple inches, and when Clint snaps his head away from the girl and across the well of the courtroom, he discovers that the judge is standing behind the bench. The barely-controlled anger that flickers across her face brings with it flashes of the Killgrave trial, and Clint suddenly remembers when she’d ordered all the attorneys into her chambers many months earlier.

He wonders where this flash of anger rates on a scale of zero to Loki Laufeyson.

He also watches as the judge slowly lowers herself back into her chair and brushes a loose strand of hair out of her face. “Miss Bishop,” she says, her jaw tight and barely moving, “you are balanced on the very narrow edge of contempt charges, right now. But I don’t think you want to sit down in a holding cell with everyone from today’s criminal docket while you wait for an actual parent—not your therapist—to come collect you.” 

Behind the defense table, the color slowly drains from Kate’s already-pale face. Her throat bobs as she nods.

“But because you and your attorney insist on having some sort of juvenile spat—which in this case replaces the word ‘immature,’ Mister Sullivan—I am going to have Mister Barton from the district attorney’s office go out into the hallway and grab the first criminal defense attorney he can find.” Clint only realizes that he’s twisted to stare at Smithe after the fact, but every bit of her attention is focused entirely on Kate Bishop and her still-squared shoulders. “That person will sit in with you for the limited purpose of this hearing, because I am not going to listen to this sniping for the rest of my afternoon.”

Sullivan snaps to his feet immediately. “With all due respect, your honor, I was hired by the Bishop family to represent their daughter.” Beside him, his client rolls her eyes. “I can’t just walk out and allow some other attorney to step in and—”

“Tell the Bishops you had the stomach flu,” the judge interrupts. There’s no hint of humor in her voice, but Sullivan sputters to a stop and gapes at her. “Or, if you’d rather, tell them that you can’t control your sixteen-year-old client and that I ordered you to step aside today. I’m not really concerned about you keeping your job if I can’t even keep order in my courtroom.” Before the attorney can stutter out another excuse, she rises from the bench. “We’re taking a ten minute recess. Mister Barton, find another attorney for Miss Bishop. I’ll send my bailiff in to make sure nothing comes to blows in the meantime.”

The door’s barely closed behind her and her sweep of black robe when Sullivan turns on Kate. “I hope you’re happy,” he snaps at her while she sinks into her chair and, wordlessly, crosses her arms over her chest. She stares at the state seal on the bench like it’s personally affronted her, but Sullivan just pushes his own chair out of the way to step in closer. “You know, Heather’s always said you’re a little pain in the ass, but I never thought—”

“I’m sorry, but I need you to stop talking,” an unfamiliar voice interrupts. Clint abandons his effort to look like he’s not eavesdropping—hey, he definitely wasn’t leaving Sullivan and the kid alone without supervision no matter _what_ errand Smithe ordered—to twist around. Standing just inside the doorway of the courtroom is a brown-haired woman in worn jeans and a spring wind-breaker. He squints for a second at the card that’s dangling around her neck and realizes a couple seconds too late that it’s a county ID badge. She abandons her jacket on one of the benches in the gallery and heads straight for the defense table. “Because if you keep talking, I have to call Mister Bishop and explain why his daughter—my patient—is being verbally harassed by her attorney, and that’s always awkward.”

Kate keeps staring at the state seal, but Clint can see her loosen her grip on her own arms. “Hey, Jess.”

“Miss Jones,” the woman retorts. Her tone’s almost warm, like maybe the name thing is a subject of a long-standing debate. Clint thinks for a second that she’s familiar, this Jess Jones, but he can’t place why. He watches as she settles her hands on her hips. Her eyes never lift from Sullivan. “From what I understand, I’m playing the role of Derek Bishop today.”

“And from what I understand, I’m playing the role of ‘She’s Your Problem Now,’” Sullivan replies crisply.

Clint flinches at that and, without another word, leaves the situation in what he hopes are the capable hands of Kate’s therapist. The hallway, empty as it is, feels like a breath of extraordinarily fresh air, and he pauses just to let his head stop spinning. He tries to sort out the cast of characters in his head—Kate, her attorney, her absentee step-mother, her jet-setting father, Miss Jones—and ends up with a dull ache behind his eyes. What’s worse, the only person nearby is one of the juvenile clerks, a pretty girl in skinny pants who’s repapering the bulletin board about community initiatives for children and their families.

The clerk glances his way and smiles politely. Clint forces a smile back even as he rubs his temple.

He’s just about decided to go attorney-hunting in the law library upstairs when a voice suddenly announces, “If it’s not my favorite moral compass and all around good-guy! Man, we need to bro-fist it out _so_ hard!”

Clint can’t decide whether the feeling that wells up in his stomach is dread or relief. He decides to sort that one out later and immediately turns in the direction of the sound. “Wade,” he greets, and obediently raises his hand.

Apparently, his fist is not bro-fisted enough for Wade’s taste, because the guy stops in the middle of what he’s previously informed Clint is _proper bro-fisting form_ , reaches over to adjust Clint’s hand, and then knocks their knuckles together. Despite the insanity of the last twenty minutes or so, Clint feels the corners of his mouth kicking up into a grin. 

At least, until Wade steps back and scowls at him. “Okay, wait, did something happen? Because you look so far down in the dumps that I think you’re going to have to come _out_ of the dumps in China, because you went all the way _through_ the dumps.” Clint snorts and rolls his eyes, but Wade leans in closer. Too close, because Clint can smell his ten-bucks-a-bottle cologne. “You and weirdly-hot nerd guy didn’t part ways or anything, did you? Because, I mean, Nate’s super weird about sharing so I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to carnally comfort you during your time of need anymore, and—”

“Okay, no,” Clint interrupts. He holds up his hands, and Wade snaps his mouth shut. “No offense, but you wouldn’t be the person I called for that, uh, ‘service.’”

Wade’s face drops into a frown. The expression straddles the line between disappointed and annoyed. Clint’s not sure he knew that those two emotions _shared_ a line before he met Wade Wilson. “Don’t you _dare_ knock my skills until you try them,” Wade chides. “Just last week, I was informed that my technique during a quickly office bl—”

“No,” Clint interrupts.

“But—”

“No.”

Clint’s not totally sure whether it’s the sudden amusement that jumps onto Wade’s face or the accompanying snort of a laugh, but either way, he’s powerless to stop the grin that sneaks up on him. He tries to swallow his snicker, loses, and then watches as Wade dissolves into actual laughter. He thinks he feels the clerk staring at both of them, but he can’t help himself; the tension from the courtroom unfurls like a flag in the wind, and for a couple seconds, he can actually relax.

“You are a horrible ass-face, and I hate you,” Wade declares, but he’s hiding the last of his giggles in the cuff of his checkered shirt.

“You can hate me all you want,” Clint replies, “but I could actually kinda use your help.” The laughter drops away immediately and is replaced with a wide-eyed look of abject concern. Clint shakes his head, which is pretty effective for stopping a new ramble in its tracks. “Not the kind of help you’re thinking,” he clarifies. “I’ve walked into the weirdest case of my life—”

“Ever?” Wade interrupts.

Clint stops to frown at the other man. “I’m not talking to you about the goat case.”

“Uh, it’s a pretty awesome case.”

“Because you got the goat-fucker off, right?” Wade flashes him a thousand-watt grin, and Clint sighs as he rolls his eyes. “Like I was saying,” Clint presses, “this case is some kinda shit show, and I need to find a defense attorney to sit in on this first appearance.” 

He glances in Wade’s direction, and Wade—by virtue of the fact that he’s Wade Wilson—immediately glances over his shoulder. The hallway’s empty aside from the two of them and the clerk, and Clint watches as Wade’s face slowly shifts from confusion to understanding. “You mean me, don’t you?”

“You need to be somewhere?”

“I feel like the right answer is ‘yes, and that place is not here,’ but you’re super creepy and always see straight through my lies.” Clint presses his lips together to keep from grinning, and Wade jabs him in the shoulder with his index finger. “It’s creepy.”

“I don’t do it on purpose.”

“And that’s what makes it so supercalifragilisticexpialidocious _creepy_.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how that word works, you know.”

“The dew-kissed lips of Dame Julie Andrews would disagree, Disney heathen,” Wade immediately returns. Clint snorts a laugh at him, shaking his head slightly, but the guy claps him on the shoulder. “Come on. Take me to your miscreant before I change my mind and make up some really important and sexy meeting that I _have_ to be at.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “I’m sure your coworkers love that you two are finally dating,” he comments as they walk toward the courtroom.

“Carol says I talk less when I’m getting laid on a regular basis,” Wade replies, and Clint almost walks _into_ the door because he’s laughing so hard.

Back in the courtroom, Tanner Sullivan is slouched in the back-left corner bench, his perfect suit rumpled and his cell phone clutched in his hands. He’s furiously texting someone, his thumbs reduced to a pale, fleshy blur, and he never once glances up in Clint and Wade’s direction. Wade even waves at the guy; the only response is a clenched jaw and a grumble that’s clearly directed at the phone. Jess Jones, the therapist, is sitting up next to Kate, her ass planted on the very edge of the crappy vinyl. Kate’s back is to the gallery, her head drooping slightly, but Clint thinks he catches her nodding at whatever Jones is murmuring about.

When the therapist spots Clint, she stands and pulls out the chair. “I was afraid you wouldn’t find anyone,” she admits. “Kate was ready to declare me her lawyer and be done with the whole thing.” There’s a spark of something wry in her smile. Clint thinks he might like this Jones woman.

“You’d be surprised how hard it is to find an attorney when you need one. It’s like we collectively sense trouble and run the other way.” Clint’s all the way back at counsel table when he realizes that Wade’s still standing in the middle of the aisle. He’s clutching his messenger bag against his gut and staring directly at Kate Bishop. Worse, Kate’s eying him like he’s a particularly disappointing fast-food meal. 

“Wade,” Clint warns.

“She’s a kid,” Wade blurts.

Kate huffs and rolls her eyes. “I’m sixteen, not _six_ ,” she informs Wade. Her tone’s still sharp, but it lacks the acidity from a few minutes earlier. Clint promptly decides that Jones is a miracle worker. “That’s hardly a kid.”

“I don’t do kids.” Wade glances in Clint’s direction, and Clint bites down on a sigh when he notes the panic in the guy’s expression. “Clint, tell her I don’t do kids.”

“I can hear you,” Kate points out. Jones shoots her a warning look, but the girl just crosses her arms.

“We all know she’s a kid,” Clint says. He catches Sullivan smirking in the back of the room, the little bastard. “But she needs an attorney in order to enter her first appearance, and you were the only one I could find. Just do your defense thing, okay?”

“I don’t _do_ kids,” Wade presses. Clint’s surprised he’s not backing slowly out of the room while crossing himself, he’s so damn adamant about it. When Kate glances at him, he raises the bag to cover his chest instead of his stomach. “Hell, I barely do _Nate’s_ kid, and she’s a _kid_ -kid. She doesn’t wear pencil skirts, or a ponytail like that, or—”

Whatever belongs in the second half of Wade’s sentence is cut off by the secure door opening and Judge Smithe walking back out into the courtroom. Clint steels himself for the coming train-wreck of an explanation— _yeah, your honor, I found an attorney, it’s just that he refuses to talk to children_ —but then, something miraculous happens. Because once Jones squeezes Kate’s shoulder and steps back into the gallery, Wade heaves a sigh and heads straight for counsel table.

He strips off his bag, straightens his tie, and sinks into the crappy vinyl chair like he belongs there. “I don’t do kids,” he hisses at Kate.

“You have a Batman tie,” she retorts. “Doesn’t that pretty much make you a kid?”

From where he’s sitting, Clint thinks he catches Judge Smithe’s mouth quirking into a tiny grin. “We’re back on the record in State versus K.E.B.,” she says, and Kate and Wade both sit up a little straighter for that. “I think we only got as far as defense appearances last time. Mister Wilson?”

“Uh, sure, yeah,” Wade says, hopping up out of his chair. “Wade Wilson appears with his client, who is, uh—”

“Kate Bishop,” the girl mutters.

“Kate Bishop. And, uh, she’s here, in person, not in custody, and wearing really awesome shoes for a kid.”

Clint watches as Judge Smithe presses her lips together. He’s not sure he’s witnessing a smile, but he knows that she’s trying to hide whatever expression is lurking behind her glasses. She dips her head to examine the file. “And standing in for her parent, we have—”

“Jessica Jones,” the therapist answers, rising from her seat in the gallery like she’s covered a thousand hearings like this. She slides a piece of paper out of her back pocket. “I’m Kate’s therapist. I have an affidavit that Heather Bishop signed yesterday afternoon, if you’d like it.”

“She faxed the court the same,” the judge replies. She nods at Jones, who settles back into her seat. When Smithe finally looks up from her file again, though, all signs of amusement’ve drained right off her face. She eyes Kate curiously. Clint thinks maybe she wants to strip away all of the girl’s bravado—not to mention the outfit and the ridiculous heels—and find the person who’s hiding underneath. She’s still watching Kate carefully when she asks, “Mister Barton, can you summarize the charges?”

Clint jerks to his feet without really thinking. “Sure,” he answers, and pulls the post-it note off the charging document so he can read through the list. Or, rather, the first half of the list; there’s a whole second page of charges, plus a list of potential witnesses and the names of the investigating officers. “Miss Bishop is charged with four counts of simple battery, one count of aggravated battery with intent to cause serious bodily harm—”

“It was just his nose,” Kate grumbles. Wade nearly falls off his chair in his attempt to whip around and shush her.

“—and five counts of simple assault.” Clint suddenly realizes how much the girl earned Bucky’s low whistle from the other day. “These charges stem from an incident on or about the twenty-seventh of April here in Suffolk County, where the juvenile allegedly participated in a fight with five boys, injuring all of them and sending one to the hospital with a broken nose and mild concussion.”

Clint thinks he hears Kate scoff at the word _concussion_. Smithe, however, just nods. “Does your client want a formal reading of the charges?” she asks Wade.

“Uh,” Wade responds. He glances at Kate, who shrugs her narrow shoulders. The gesture hardly moves her starched white shirt. “No, your honor, I think we’re good on that one, thanks.”

“Then how does she plead?”

“Uh, well,” Wade says dumbly. He glances over at the girl next to him. She’s still sitting up straight, but Clint knows from the tension in her arms that she’s gripping her hands tightly together under the table. “I think she pleads— Uh, Miss Bishop?”

Kate starts to open her mouth, but Wade sorta flaps his hand until she rises from her seat. She stands there for a second in open court, stock still, and Clint swears for a second he can see two versions of her: the girl he met back last fall, and the pale, tired teenager who’s appeared in her place. “Not guilty, your honor.”

The judge nods and then drops her eyes to her file for the first time since she restarted the hearing, reviewing the charging documents to make sure there’s sufficient information to charge the girl with all ten— _ten_ —counts of assault and battery. Clint automatically glances at his own file, checking for typos with an eye he knows’ll never match Steve’s careful attention. He’s so busy rereading the count of aggravated battery that he almost misses Kate asking, “Who’s Nate?”

Across the aisle, Wade jerks his head away from Judge Smithe. Clint’s not sure whether he’d started staring at her out of reverence or sheer nerves. He frowns at his temporary client. “Nate?”

“You said something about not dealing with Nate’s kid,” Kate presses. She’s not quite whispering. Behind her, Jessica Jones looks like she’s maybe gritting her teeth. “Who’s Nate? Your brother or something?”

“Uh, well, actually—”

“We’re in the middle of a hearing,” Clint points out. Judge Smithe keeps her eyes on the file, but he thinks he spots a smile. 

Wade nods a little in response and falls gloriously silent. Clint almost releases a sigh of relief, too, until Wade follows up his moment of restraint by blurting, “Nate’s my boyfriend, and now we need to listen to Clint before he throws his pissy face at— Oh, okay, never mind, it arrived ahead of schedule.”

Clint feels his glare intensify until his jaw actually hurts from clenching, but it’s coupled with Kate Bishop snickering behind a hand. He wants to appreciate the moment of levity—god knows there’s never laughter in Judge English’s courtroom—but it’s immediately interrupted by Judge Smithe clearing her throat. “The court finds that there is sufficient evidence to support the charges of five counts of simple assault, four counts of simple battery, and one count of aggravated battery.” She removes her glasses and sets them on the file. “Does either party have any arguments on placing her in custody? I know she was released from the police station after booking, but I don’t know if you wanted her in juvenile lock-up or—”

She trails off with a little wave of her hand, so Clint pushes out of his seat. “At this time, your honor, the State’s satisfied with Miss Bishop staying at home as long as she obeys the law and keeps away from her victims.” Out of the corner of his eye, he catches Kate flipping her ponytail. “And maybe the court should suggest that she cooperate in this process, since I think she’s kinda struggling with that one.”

Someone at the defense table sputters, but Judge Smithe ignores it by nodding curtly. “I sincerely hope that Miss Bishop is starting to understand the gravity of this situation,” she replies. When her sharp eyes narrow back in on the girl, Kate immediately stills. Clint can’t decide whether she’s terrified of the judge or just that she might be caught scoffing and snorting. “Most of these offenses carry the possibility of detention,” Smithe continues smoothly, “and that’s not even counting the fact that I was seconds away from declaring you in contempt.” She folds her hands atop the bench. “I suggest you get your priorities straight now, before you find yourself in front of a less sympathetic judge with an _un_ sympathetic prosecutor. Do I make myself clear?”

For a moment, Kate stays frozen. When she finally replies, her _yes_ is rushed and breathless.

Smithe nods again. “You seem like a smart girl, so I won’t read you the riot act I save for the so-called ‘tough cookies’ who wander in here. You will obey all the laws of this state, including curfew, and you will participate in your defense. If you and Mister Sullivan can’t work out your differences—” In the back of the room, the perfectly-pressed attorney mutters something that sounds a lot like _yeah, because that’s likely_. “—then I would encourage you to talk to your parents and find a new attorney. If it turns out that they can’t actually afford one, then you could request court-appointed counsel.” The judge glances past Kate for a moment, and Clint realizes that she’s studying Jones’s face. “You’re in therapy with Miss Jones?”

“Group counseling,” Kate replies. There’s a tiny spark of energy in the way it springs from her lips, but the enthusiasm dies when she realizes that Smithe’s staring her down again. “Once a week for two hours.”

“Good. You’ll continue attending counseling regularly. Because if you get into any more trouble or you start skipping those appointments, the district attorney’s office will bring you back in here and we’ll look into other options for you.” The judge’s face hardens into stone. “And none of those involve you staying at home. Do you understand?”

Kate’s chin bobs slightly, but her lips remain tightly pursed together. It takes Wade nudging her lightly in the arm for her to actually respond, “Yes, your honor.” The words sound timid for the first time all afternoon, and Clint wonders if maybe she’s finally figured out that nobody in the room is playing around.

Judge Smithe smiles slightly. “In that case, I’ll have the clerks set a date for a status conference next week. Hopefully by then, you’ll have the attorney situation sorted out.”

Kate’s frown creases her entire face. “I can’t just keep this one?” she asks. 

The tiny note of hope in the back of her tone’s hard to miss, apparently, because Wade immediately twists around to gape at her. “Sorry, I think I hallucinated just then, because I swear I heard you say—”

“That is up to your parents, Mister Wilson, and Legal Aid’s policies on retained counsel,” Judge Smithe replies. This time, her smile bunches her laugh line. “We’re adjourned for the day. All rise.”

Clint rises out of his chair while Wade starts listing off a number of reasons why he will never represent Kate Bishop in another hearing. The list includes burritos, high-heeled shoes, and his inability to read cursive, and Clint laughs a little to himself as he cleans up his file. He spends longer than necessary trying to memorize the names of the boys that Kate beat up, but they all blend together; apparently, 1995 saw a lot of boys with names ending in –an, because Evan, Dylan, and Devan’s names all start to look the same the longer he skims over them.

He’s still reviewing the file when something lightly impacts his shoulder. He catches a glimpse of a pale gray suit coat and rolls his eyes. Wade, as you’d expect, nudges him harder. “You so owe me,” he says.

Clint snorts at him. “Order of the court, Wilson.”

“Uh, I just survived Drusilla, queen of the completely terrifying teenage girls,” Wade retorts. He must catch Clint grinning, too, because he reaches over and flips the official case file closed. When Clint reaches for it, he slides it over to the edge of the table and plants his palm in the middle of the cover. Clint glares at him. “You owe me at least two _enormous_ beers. Like, you know the ones they sell at The High Bar, the ones where you think you can’t possibly drink it but then you do and it’s amazing? Two of those.”

“You realize that nobody over the age of thirty hangs out at that bar, right?”

“I’ll call Coulson and make sure we pack you the walker that folds up all nice and portable,” Wade retorts. Clint chuckles and shakes his head, but glancing up at Wade means catching Kate and her therapist in conversation. Kate’s hands are shoved deep in the pockets of her skirt, and she stares at the floor rather than watching Jones’s emphatic little hand gestures. He’s not sure Jones even notices the girl’s distraction.

Wade, however, must notice _his_ distraction, because he waves a hand in Clint’s face. Clint scowls at him and tries to slap it away, but as usual, Wade’s a half-degree too fast. “You’re not imagining sweaty walker-sex, right?” Wade asks, and Clint barely manages to contain his grin. “Because that’s creepy. You get to a certain age, you’re supposed to swear off the extra-curricular activities.”

“And how old is Nate again?” Clint returns.

“He’s almost fo— Oh, do _not_ go there,” Wade squeaks, and when Clint laughs, he smacks him with his bag.

 

==

 

“She was hell in heels,” Clint explains as he tosses one of those self-steaming freezer bags of vegetables into the microwave and starts hitting the various number buttons. NPR’s playing some story on an art museum he and Phil’ll never actually visit, but it’s nice white noise over the sound of boiling water and sizzling meat. “And I mean that literally, because I’m pretty sure Pepper owns the same shoes as her in beige.”

“Nude,” Phil corrects. He tries to pick a bit of sun-dried tomato out of the skillet, but Clint smacks him with the spatula. His tiny, incorrigible grin somehow triples the heat from the stove, and it only brightens when Clint raises an eyebrow. “That color of shoe is called nude.”

“I’m cutting off your _Project Runway_ supply,” Clint decides.

“I think I learned that on _Top Model_ , actually.”

“And your sisters thought you were straight?” And dammit if Phil’s laughter isn’t contagious, overtaking Clint’s deadpan expression within seconds. 

The whole house smells like the white sauce (out of a packet) that’s cooking with the chicken and the garlic bread that’s toasting in the oven, and Clint’s gotta admit: it’s good to be home. He’s barefoot and loving it, the bottom cuffs of his track pants trailing against the tile of the kitchen floor as he wanders over to grab the box of pasta. Phil’d needed to run to some bar association meet-and-greet after work, meaning he’s still in his slacks and button-down, but that definitely doesn’t discourage him from leaning against the kitchen counter and swigging from his beer.

Also doesn’t discourage Sandy from rubbing all over his ankles and leaving gray fur everywhere, but Clint takes it on good authority that cats like leaving their mark all over every swatch of dark clothes they can find.

The rest of the work day after Bishop’s hearing rushed by, filled mostly with dull paperwork and the ominous task of critiquing a motion Darcy’d banged out over her lunch hour, but try as he might, Clint’s still caught up in thinking about fiery little Kate Bishop. Jessica Jones’d called from her car a half-hour after the hearing ended and asked to schedule a meeting, but every time Clint’d tried to squeeze some actual information out of her, she’d clammed up.

“Being a therapist isn’t that different from being a lawyer,” she’d said after Clint’d rephrased his question for the third time. He could hear traffic rushing past and the blare of a car horn. “We have rules about confidentiality.”

“You’re the one who wants to meet with me,” Clint’d pointed out.

She’d sighed hard enough that the connection crackled. “It’s complicated,” she’d replied after a couple seconds of heavy silence. “Therapy aside, Kate’s one of the brightest young women I know. She knows that this is serious. She just needs help seeing that.”

Clint’d swiveled around in his chair to look out the window. The crappy saplings that the county green initiative’d planted along the edge of the parking lot had finally started to look like actual trees. “You know I’m not the one who’s supposed to help her with that, right? I’m prosecuting the case. It’s her lawyer who should be convincing her to do the right thing or whatever, not me.”

Jones’d snorted something that’d sounded a whole lot like a laugh. “You’ve met Tanner Sullivan, right?” she’d asked, and Clint’d bit the inside of his cheek to keep from chuckling at her.

In the end, he’d promised to call her later that week. He’d even stuck a big yellow post-it note to the file about it as he settled back down into the pillow pile and went to work on Darcy’s motion. But the longer he sat there, his attention drifting between the words on the page and the trees outside, the longer he’d thought about Jones’s weird question-dodging.

He’d ended up abandoning his work to go ask Thor about what role social workers and therapists played in juvenile offender cases, but he’d discovered that the guy’d headed home to his fiancée and adorable baby.

He’s still mulling over the whole thing when something lightly bumps his hip. He blinks and twists over to look at Phil in the exact moment that the pot of water starts to boil over. “Shit,” he grumbles, and fumbles to turn down the heat. Once the hissing’s reduced to some annoyed spitting, he returns his attention to the guy next to him. “Brain fart,” he explains, reaching for Phil’s beer.

Phil rolls his eyes but relinquishes the bottle anyway. “It’s good I’m used to you getting distracted and nearly burning our house down,” he comments, and Clint ignores the way his chest still kinda seizes when he hears the words _our house_. He swigs the beer, aware that Phil’s watching him with his careful, too-focused eyes. “I covered juvenile offender cases in my first six months with the county, you know. Most of them end up being pretty straightforward.”

“Thor said the same thing when I lifted the file off him,” Clint admits. He shakes his head for a second, like he’s trying to clear away the cobwebs that lurk in the back of his brain. “He basically told me to jump in and plead the case out first chance I get.”

“That’s good advice.”

“I know.”

Phil gently nudges the beer bottle out of Clint’s grip. “But something’s still bothering you.”

“Not like I can put my finger on it,” Clint returns. He kills the heat on the skillet and covers the whole thing before stepping away and leaning his ass against the counter next to the stove. With Phil standing against the island, they’re facing one another, and Clint watches the guy search his face for some recognizable emotion. Too bad Clint can’t name a single one. “But boss, I met this kid, what, nine months ago? And as snarky and spoiled as she maybe was, she wasn’t like the girl who showed up to court today. She had some baggage, sure, but now?” He drags fingers through his hair. “It’s like she transformed into a whole different person over the fall and winter.”

“Teenagers can change a lot in a year,” Phil comments, and Clint only realizes he’s been staring at the floor when he looks up at Phil. “Between the hormones, the growing pains, and all the pressure from home and school, I’m surprised we don’t see more juvenile cases.” He sips slowly from the beer bottle before handing it back to Clint. “And,” he adds while Clint takes a swig, “you only spoke with her for ten or fifteen minutes. It’s hard to know the depths of someone’s soul in that short a time frame.”

Clint raises both his eyebrows. 

“It’s hard for the average person to know the depths of someone’s soul,” Phil amends, holding up a hand. Clint can’t help grinning at him. “I forgot I was dating the world’s most observant man.”

“Technically,” Clint replies, abandoning the beer on the counter so he can step into Phil’s personal space, “you’re _living_ with the world’s most observant man.”

He can feel the heat of Phil’s smirk as he leans in close. The smell of his aftershave overtakes the smell of their dinner, and Clint breathes him in. “Oh, so we’re making that distinction now?”

“Changed the subtitle on my business cards and everything,” Clint returns, and whatever clever comeback Phil’s planning is caught up in their kiss.

They drop the conversation about the case—and, really, any conversation about work—as they settle down for dinner, meandering through such exciting topics as Bruce’s birthday at the end of the summer, the new car Phil’s parents finally bought, and the latest series of poorly-spelled, cryptic text messages from none other than Wade Wilson. They spend most of the time laughing at each other’s stupid translations of Wade’s attempt at conversation or guessing what gifts Tony might force on his better half. “Like a few more children,” Phil suggests, and Clint’s whole body shudder nearly lands his fork on the floor.

Phil wants to finish up some research for a motions hearing after work, so Clint covers the kitchen clean-up and loads the dishwasher. He even starts a load of laundry, but the whole thing never feels stupidly domestic. Not that it _isn’t_ stupidly domestic, because it’s actually the kinda shit that crappy greeting cards want you to believe all women dream about at night. But even though it would’ve left Clint feeling itchy in his own skin a year ago, he sorta loves it.

He ends up flopping down on the couch and flipping through the channels until he finds a game that he can tolerate; ten or fifteen minutes later, Phil emerges from the office with his laptop. He’s in sweats and a threadbare t-shirt, his glasses perched on his nose like he’s comfortable for the first time all day, and Clint lifts his feet from the coffee table so the guy can join him on the couch. They complain about shitty pitching rosters and the ongoing failure of a team that sports fans call the Kansas City Royals. 

They’re in the middle of a commercial break when Phil finally says, “Having you on the case might be good for her.” When Clint glances over, the guy’s scrolling through an appellate court decision on the computer. He never even looks up. “Even if she is just a teenager who’s chosen to act like a teenager, you’re a good person to scare her straight.”

Clint snorts at him. “I don’t have a lot of control over whipping her into shape, you know.”

“You might never get to have the come-to-Jesus talk with her in your cushy corner office at Cramer and March, but you know what it’s like to have been sixteen and lost.” Phil’s eyes flick over in Clint’s direction, but only for a couple seconds. “Sometimes, it’s not the case that matters, but the lawyer.”

He rolls his eyes. “You give me way too much credit.”

“I give you only the credit you deserve,” Phil retorts, and knocks their knees together.

After the ballgame ends, Clint leaves Phil on the couch to lock the front door and start the dishwasher, all the usual, mundane things that now signal the end of his evening. He remembers college and then law school, falling asleep on the couch at three a.m. with a pile of unfinished homework as his blanket. He tries to figure out when he transformed into a mostly-functional adult, but he discovers that his progress from fake frat boy to actual human being turns a little hazy around the time he graduated with his law degree. He tries to blame the piece of paper, Barney’s last pot conviction, or Phil, but for some reason, his life is kinda more than the sum of its strange component parts.

He wanders back into the living room, ready to comment on that very thing, when he realizes that Phil’s abandoned the laptop on the coffee table and is sitting forward on the edge of the couch. He assumes for a second that Phil’s flipped to one of his reality shows and is trying to catch the first couple minutes of the episode. It wouldn’t even be the first time that they headed to bed late because Phil absolutely couldn’t miss the _Top Chef_ “quickfire” round.

Then, he catches the serious, half-gaunt look on Phil’s face and decides that he’s probably not intensely worried about how well Paul cooks with arugula or whatever.

“—ended after a six month investigation,” the woman on the TV says, ending her sentence with an obvious kinda finality. Clint looks over at the screen and realizes that Phil’s watching some national news report on one of the twenty-four hour channels. The newscaster is pretty in that bland, Midwestern way, all straight blonde hair and solemn expression. Wherever she is, there’s a fine mist of rain transforming the street lights into halos of yellow-white. “As you might recall, Kevin Pruitt, his girlfriend Stacey Keith, and eight-month old daughter disappeared from a small town on the Utah-Colorado border in November of last year. Despite the best efforts of law enforcement, their bodies were only discovered in a shallow grave here, just outside of Denver, after the spring thaw in April—and now, Keith’s ex-boyfriend Terry Novak has been arrested for their murder, as well as a number of other serious federal charges.”

The image of the pretty blonde with the microphone cuts away to what’s clearly a prerecorded press conference, complete with a bland blue backdrop and a podium emblazoned with the Colorado state seal. The banner across the bottom of the screen declares that the paunchy, balding guy at the podium is some kind of public relations secretary. Clint wonders how the hell a guy with adult acne landed a job that throws him in front of the press all the damn time. “We want to assure you that our local law enforcement officers and prosecutors are working around the clock with the United States Attorney for the great state of Colorado. We will continue to assist the federal agents in their pursuit of justice for Kevin, Stacey, and their daughter.”

“Because of Novak’s federal charges,” the blonde’s voice explains as the image changes again, this time to a long-haired man in a bright orange prison jumpsuit, “the U.S. Attorney’s office will pursue the case rather than the local county prosecutors.” Clint watches as the man in orange—presumably Novak—is loaded into a waiting squad car and driven away from an enormous limestone building he assumes is a courthouse. The picture then jumps back to the blonde on the drizzly street corner. “Lead federal prosecutor Kenneth Blake has declined to comment on Novak’s criminal charges except to say that the U.S. Attorney’s Office will be prosecuting Novak to the full extent of the law, and that any crimes that cannot properly be charged by the federal authorities will be available to the local prosecutor’s office.”

The view switches back to the newsroom, where two dark-haired men switch over to a very exciting story about some new legislation in California, and Phil sighs as he reaches for the remote. When he flicks the TV off, the room pitches into heavy, half-uncomfortable silence. Clint suspects he’s supposed to assume it’s just another sad news story—guy kills girl and girl’s new family, guy buries the bodies across state lines to avoid detection, case ends up on _Criminal Minds_ a couple years down the line—but the problem with that assumption is that he knows Phil too well. Because something weighs down Phil’s shoulders as he collects his laptop and his glasses, and the worry never lifts from his face.

It’s only after Phil switches off the lamp next to the couch that Clint flashes him a quick smile. “Reminds me of our big case,” he offers, and he’s relieved to see the corner of Phil’s mouth quirk up into a little smirk. “Horrible facts, doom and gloom, every news station in a six-state radius filling their dead air with updates ‘cause it was that or talking about Idaho’s latest potato crop.”

Phil releases a snort that you might kinda interpret as annoyed if it wasn’t for the way the laugh lines crinkle in the corners of his eyes. “All we’re really missing is a megalomaniacal Croatian with a God complex, and we’ll be in business.”

Clint grins at him. “Think you mean Yugoslavian, boss.”

“This from the man who stuck a post-it note on the coffee table because he couldn’t remember which channel ESPN was,” Phil retorts, but he bumps their shoulders together before he heads down the hallway to the office.

It’s a good half-hour later, once they’re settled into bed with all the lights off, when Clint feels Phil sigh against the back of his neck. It raises gooseflesh all along his arms, a little shiver that travels straight down to the pit of his belly, but he knows from experience that Phil’s not trying to turn him on. No, a breath like that’s a thoughtful one, saved up for when he’s wrestling with complicated thoughts that aren’t quite ready to turn into words. He’s watched Phil sigh like that a thousand times while he preps for trial or works through a motion. Usually, though, the victim of his warm breath’s the pencil clenched between his teeth, not Clint’s skin.

He tugs Phil a little closer and Phil complies, pressing against Clint’s back like they’re two people sculpted from the same clay. When he stays quiet, Clint closes his eyes and relaxes.

He’s drifting through the heat of Phil’s skin under the sheets when Phil says, “A friend of mine from law school called me last week about a hypothetical case.” Clint shifts just enough that he can see the side of Phil’s face over his shoulder. In the near-dark, it’s hard to read his expression, but it’s pretty obvious that the seriousness from the living room’s carried over into bed. “We’ve done it for years, always as a thought exercise. I can’t remember the last time I used actual facts from one of my cases to play _who wins the jurisdiction battle?_ It’s mostly law school flashbacks and bad jokes about long-arm statutes.”

Clint snorts a little at him, but it’s impossible to miss the way Phil shakes his head. “Lemme guess,” he says after a couple seconds of silence. “The latest round involved a triple murder where the bodies crossed state lines.”

“Among other things, yes.” Phil catches his eyes for a half-second, a fleeting glance that makes Clint wish he’d taught himself to read minds instead of how to hit a tin can with a crossbow from across Trick’s lot. But then, Phil leans in enough to press a kiss to the back of his bare shoulder and settle back down onto the pillow. “Then again, Ken’s never been very subtle.”

“Surprised you guys are still friends,” Clint returns, and he’s rewarded by a warm chuckle at the back of his neck. He wants to say something else, something thoughtful beyond the shitty reality of the situation—that yeah, people murder each other and transport bodies across state lines, that eight-month-olds end up buried in shallow graves, that federal prosecutors turn complicated cases into a game of “Where in the World is Proper Jurisdiction?”—but everything ends up falling pretty flat.

He tangles his fingers with Phil’s and tries to drift off to sleep without thinking about their complicated lives as prosecutors and people.

When he dreams, he dreams about Kate Bishop and her flyaway hair in the September wind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People can either be prosecuted in federal court when the case involves rights that belong to the federal government or the crime occurs on government property. The condition that requires federal rights has been interpreted to include when crimes that would generally be prosecuted by local government—such as murder—involve transportation across state lines. In order to invoke the federal prosecutor’s office, then, the crime became more gruesome than in my initial plans.
> 
> Agent Blake, who lacks a first name, appears in the Marvel One-Shot “Item 47.” I spent a long time attempting to find a first name for him. 
> 
> I finally figured out where in the nation our heroes live. Read more about the state of Ames [here.](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/68533122992/behold-the-state-of-ames-the-home-to-our)
> 
> Did you know there’s a podfic of last year’s Christmas story “Not Calm, But Bright”? Find it [here](http://archiveofourown.org/chapters/2143092), and marvel in its majesty.
> 
> For the next three weeks, I will be coupling my normal update (either Diversions or Cardboard Hedgehog) with a holiday story. This week’s offering: [“You Only Christmas Shop Once (A Year),” starring Wade Wilson and Hope Summers.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1072054)


	4. Surviving the Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, Clint copes with a stubborn intern, a difficult caseload, ridiculous friends—and a teenager he barely understands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to Jen and saranoh, the beta-readers who always ensure that my words are the very best they can be. And point out when I misspell Judge Nguyen's name. Yes, it happens more regularly than you might think. 
> 
> And thanks as always to my readers, who make every day of the year a joy and who I'm so, so grateful to have in my corner. You are each marvelous. I could not do this without you. I am the luckiest writer in the world, seriously.

“I’m not saying it’s a hot mess,” Clint says for the sixth time, gesturing futilely to the gently-edited motion that’s sitting on top of a massive pile of traffic files. His purple scratch-outs and arrows are few and far between—at least, on the first page. He cringes when he suddenly remembers how much more chicken-scratch covers the next couple pages. “I’m just saying that I’ve seen you write before, and this is pretty sloppy.”

“You’re sloppy,” Darcy sneers, tossing her hair over her shoulder. She’s slouched down in her desk chair, her arms crossed under her breasts and her face tightened into a permanent glare. Clint can’t decide whether he wants to bang his head against the nearest wall or just crawl under a desk and die. Worse, he’s pretty sure Darcy’s cheering for that second part. 

“I’m pretty sure most people’d agree with that,” he responds after another second of her intense death-stare. “But if you’d just look at what I wrote, I think you’d agree—”

When he reaches for the motion, her hand snaps out from under her arm and slaps him hard on the wrist. He yelps and jerks back while his skin flare red. It stings like a snake bite, and rubbing definitely does _not_ help.

“That’s why I chose the blonde intern,” Bucky sing-songs as he passes by Darcy’s cubicle, and Clint seriously considers tripping him.

Darcy crosses her arms even harder, glaring at Bucky’s back, and Clint just shakes his head. He and Steve’d spent probably six or seven hours over three days discussing the various virtues of hiring Darcy on as a summer intern. She fit every quality they looked for in an intern: she was due to finish her law degree either in May or over next summer; she planned on taking exactly zero summer classes thanks to lousy course offerings—though Clint still wishes somebody’d grabbed a picture of Bruce’s face when she said she’d rather sit through a root canal without drugs than enroll in a family law class; and, ridiculous hair and clothing choices aside, she really was smart as hell. Steve’d agreed, but Phil and Maria’d worn concerned faces for the better part of a week once they’d made a call. 

“I just don’t want this to complicate office politics,” Phil’d said one night in March, the two of them sprawled in Clint’s sheets while still pleasantly sore in all the right places. Clint’d stopped pressing lazy kisses to a spot around Phil’s navel and glanced up at him. “Darcy’s worked with us for a long time. She might not see herself as an ordinary intern.”

Clint’d tried not to groan into the soft plane of Phil’s stomach. “Can’t our pillow talk just involve how hot we both are and where we’re going to hurt in the morning?”

Phil’d chuckled as he ran his fingers through Clint’s hair. “No.”

“In that case: yeah. Darcy won’t see herself like all the other interns, and she’ll work her ass off to remind us she’s that much better.” Phil’d hummed a little in consideration, so Clint’d dragged himself up the length of the bed and flopped down next to him. “We can handle Darcy.”

“We,” Phil’d asked, propping his head up on a hand, “or you?”

Clint’d shrugged. “Either way,” he’d replied, and then the conversation’d dropped away for slow, post-sex kissing.

It wasn’t until Darcy’s official start date as a combination trial assistant and intern that Clint’d realized he’d volunteered to supervise her during the process.

He leans forward on the half-wall divider that separates Darcy’s cubicle from the outside world, quietly hating his post-sex brain. “Look,” he says, and tries to sound gentle as possible about it—which is hard, ‘cause Darcy’s glaring at him again. “You’re a good writer, but a motion to revoke a diversion isn’t like anything you’ve ever written before. You think in high-level legal analysis, and that’s good, but this is a pretty dumbed-down version of what you’re used to.”

She rolls her eyes. “I took pretrial advocacy,” she informs him haughtily. “I’ve argued motions like this.”

“Argued, not _written_ ,” Clint stresses. When she huffs, hair falls back over her shoulder. “That’s how your motion reads, like you’re arguing it instead of writing it, and that—”

“I used your template, so if there’s something wrong with it, that’s not—”

“You can trust templates for motions to dismiss or continuances, Darcy, but this is more complicated than—”

“It’s not like anyone but you is going to read it with a red pen like it’s a high school essay, anyway, so—”

“Looks like another productive day in our traffic division,” a third voice comments, and Clint only realizes how tightly he’s clenching his hands and jaw when Phil’s steady, reassuring hand touches the small of his back. He flinches slightly, mostly because of how annoyed he still is at Darcy, and lets Phil’s lazily-sweeping thumb pull him down off the ledge. “Am I interrupting? Because I can come back if—”

“No,” Clint replies, but his voice is lost in Darcy’s immediate, “Definitely not.” They look at one another for a second, and when her arms finally start to loosen, Clint allows a tiny smile to nudge at the corner of his lips. He glances over his shoulder at Phil, who’s dressed in his full suit and armed with a case file and his portfolio. Ready to argue one of those motions he’s spent the last week fighting with, then. “You need me for something, boss?”

He shakes his head, but not before the lines at the corners of his eyes crinkle. “Usually, yes, but not right now. I actually wanted to borrow your intern.”

In his peripheral vision, Clint watches Darcy’s slouched spine snap to attention. He, against his better judgment, raises his eyebrows. “You do?” 

Darcy scowls at him, her arms tightening again, but Phil chuckles. “Ward’s helping Stark cite-check an appeal that needs to be sent out first thing tomorrow morning, and I’d like a second chair to take notes at this motion hearing. I think Darcy’s the only other one with handwriting I can read.”

Clint frowns. “If Captain Bland’s handling Stark’s menial work, where’s Pepper?”

Phil shoots him a half-second warning look. Apparently, the intern with a very small range of facial expressions resents all the nicknames he’s earning around the office. Twice, Bucky’s stopped him in the hallway and instructed him to smile, and Thor routinely asks him if somebody he loves has died recently. Clint grins at Phil, his best innocent expression, and Phil rolls his eyes. “She’s handling his _other_ menial work, I think. We received three or four different transcripts this week—some of them thousands of pages long—and I think they’re sorting through all the boxes.”

“Over-under on them killing each other?” Darcy asks. 

When Clint glances over at her, she’s shoving a bright pink pen into her portfolio. He jerks his head at it a little, and she scowls before switching it out for a regular blue one. “I give them six hours,” he guesses.

“And Bruce might just help hide the body,” Phil adds. He strokes his thumb over Clint’s back one last time before stepping away. “I’m going to go down to Judge Nguyen’s courtroom. I’ll see you there in ten minutes?”

Darcy, in the process of switching out her flats for her heels (she calls them her “Badass Courtroom Bitch” shoes, and Clint shakes his head every time), balances on one foot like an awkward, curvy flamingo. When she starts to teeter, Clint sticks his arm out so she can grab it instead of falling over. “I’ll be down in six,” she promises.

She immediately starts to shove her other foot into her shoe, missing the way Phil nods at her—and then, the way he smiles softly at Clint. There’s something enigmatic lurking around the edges of his expression, sneaking into his gentle eyes and touching the corners of his mouth, and Clint wonders whether he originally intended on asking Darcy to sit with him during the hearing. He decides not to ask, though, and instead watches as he and his well-cut suit head down the hallway and out of sight.

Darcy, on the other hand, gags. “God, you’re pathetic,” she informs him as she drops her jelly bracelets onto her desk. Clint shoves her lightly, and she side-steps in those heels like a baby giraffe. “If this was an anime, you’d have googly heart eyes.”

“You know I don’t really know what an anime is, right?” 

She rolls her eyes at him. “I think I liked you more when you were a bottomless pit of angst and pining,” she decides. He snorts and watches as she shrugs into her blazer and adjusts the TARDIS pin on the lapel. Clint’d twice suggested that she replace it with one of their three thousand _Suffolk County District Attorney_ pins, but Darcy claimed that she’d only ever wear one if hired on as a full attorney. (The coversation’d eventually turned into predictions of who’d leave first and why. Darcy suspected Natasha’d leave for a full-time position as Terrifying Redheaded Ninja.) She smoothes her jacket, buttons it carefully, and then rests her hands on her hips. “You’re weird now.”

“I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment or not,” Clint returns. She stares him down for a half-second, and he’s sure he’s about to get a piece of her mind when she bursts out laughing. She smacks him lightly in the upper arm, her curls bobbing as she shakes her head, and Clint frowns at her. “What?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way—”

“‘Cause that’s the way to start a sentence I _won’t_ take the wrong way.”

“—but I’m so glad you didn’t get disbarred.”

Clint’s not sure whether it’s her honesty or the sentiment itself that leaves him staring at her for a couple beats too long, because she heaves a sigh like he’s disappointed her. She grabs her portfolio, pockets the pink pen she’d abandoned a couple minutes earlier, and then shoots him a dirty look. “That was actually a compliment,” she points out.

“I know,” he admits, shrugging, “but I’m still trying to figure out who you are and what happened to the _real_ Darcy Lewis, ‘cause—”

She hits him again, this time with her portfolio, before starting to stomp away. He laughs at her, but good-naturedly. He knows Bruce, Thor, and—to a lesser extent—Natasha are perfect matches for Jane’s temperament (and for managing their own cases while she finishes up maternity leave) and he can’t imagine Hill and Phil working with anybody but Peggy, but he’s constantly pretty glad that he landed Darcy as a trial assistant. 

He’s still thinking about that when he hears Darcy call out, “Hey, Clint.” Her head’s hanging around the corner of the hallway that’ll lead her out to the main corridor, and even though she’s smiling slightly, there’s something serious caught in her expression. He blinks at her, which is the best acknowledgement he can come up with. “Once I’m done with your boyfriend, we can talk about that motion, okay?”

“I really don’t like the way you just said ‘done with my boyfriend,’” Clint informs her, and she cackles as she disappears around the corner. 

 

==

 

“That’s why I’m saying, if you lemme borrow Bucky for a couple days, we can maybe plead some of these out or convince the stubborn ones to get on a diversion plan,” Clint reiterates, leaning over the desk and gesturing at the list of pending cases. Phil glances over the rims of his glasses, his lips pursed into a tight line; behind him, Maria sets her hands on her hips and sighs. All of a sudden, Clint feels like he’s pitching a senior capstone paper to his pissed-off history professors, not explaining case management issues to the folks who’re technically his bosses. “Look,” he says, and drags a hand through his hair, “I’m not happy about the backlog, either. But Nat’s sex assault case went to jury trial and Sif dragged it out for four days—”

“I still can’t believe she didn’t bully her client into a plea deal,” Maria grumbles, shaking her head.

“—and Judge English re-set a dozen cases to deal with losing a docket day.” He leans back over and gestures to the line of case numbers highlighted in pink. He’d tried to convince Darcy to use normal, professional colors—yellow and blue, maybe green in a pinch—but she’d gone with purple, pink, and orange. “I had Darcy star everybody who’s charged at a felony-level—there’s eight of them, by the way,” he adds, and Phil nods when he catches his eyes. “That means we’re running into speedy trial issues unless I can get another body calling these attorneys and trying to deal.”

From where she’s hovering behind Phil’s desk, Maria pinches the bridge of her nose. She’s dressed in a navy blue suit, but her jacket’s slung over the top of Phil’s file cabinet and the sleeves of her blouse are rolled up. Clint knows she spent the morning in docket and now is filling her afternoon with meetings like these, trying to manage the debris from what Clint’s learning is the usual spring explosion of cases. She looks like she’s about ready to light someone on fire. “I cannot believe March Madness does this every year,” she decides.

Phil glances over his shoulder to flash her a crooked grin. “Didn’t your ex-husband get cited for public drunkenness two years in a row?”

“Yet another reason why I walked away with the house and the car and all he got was the dog,” Maria retorts cleanly, and Clint coughs with the effort of swallowing his laugh.

Wednesdays are usually one of Clint’s easier days, a time to catch up on paperwork and start prepping for his perpetually-heavy Friday caseload, but not today. From the time he walked in the door just after eight-thirty—armed with a doughnut and smug grin about keeping Phil in bed for an extra half-hour, thanks for asking—until now, he’s zipped through back-to-back meetings, appointments, and hearings. He’s argued a motion to suppress, signed off on more traffic diversion agreements than he can count—and seriously, who refuses to pay a ticket for blowing through a stop sign?—drifted in and out of sentencing hearings, and jumped on and off the phone with three different defense attorneys for his three different traffic trials on Friday. He’s swamped and slowly drowning, a fact made all the more apparent by how jumpy and pissed-off Darcy is.

He’d just about finished with the pile on his desk marked _urgent_ when Maria’d shown up and walked him down the hall for a case management meeting with her and Phil.

On bright side, at least Fury hadn’t stopped by to talk about their bumper crop of drunk drivers.

Maria rubs her temple. “I should know tomorrow whether we’re settling Shaw or not—”

“The robbery case?” Clint asks without thinking. He only realizes that he’s staring at her when he watches her mouth kick up in a tiny grin. “The one scheduled to go for a week because the guy swore he didn’t do it?”

“Don’t forget, it’s also the one where Heimdall swore on his honor as an attorney _and_ a man that he’d leave with a not-guilty verdict.” Phil crosses his arms over his chest and grins at Maria. “I still think she flashed him some leg.”

This time, Clint can’t hold back his laugh. Better yet, Maria can’t hide her smile, even if she pointedly rolls her eyes at the man in front of her. “I flashed him a ballistics expert, three eye witnesses, and a stack of CCTV tapes.” When Phil kept grinning, she reached over to shove his shoulder. Clint’d watched Phil’s youngest sister Sam pull the same tactic to avoid his teasing. “And my point,” she continues, leaning down to gesture at the case list that’s spread all over the desk, “is that I could pick up a few of these next week. If they plea out, I can probably pick up this hearings. And if they don’t . . . ”

She trails off, shrugging slightly, and Phil’s grin sharpens into something like a smirk. “The house stays cleaner if he’s working twelve hour days,” he comments, and Maria groans as she reaches for another page of the Clint’s case spreadsheet.

Her distraction allows Clint a couple seconds to smile back at the guy across the desk and enjoy the way Phil’s glasses magnify the warmth in his eyes and the laugh lines that only crinkle when he’s in a genuinely good mood. The office’s slowed down for the most part, easing into what everybody who’s been there more than a single year calls the summer lull. Clint didn’t understand the name until their Monday morning staff meeting, when everybody’d gone around the room to update Fury on their case loads—or, more specifically, the number of cases they’d cleared off their desks. Bruce’s returned six kids to their parents in the last three weeks, Thor’s at an all-time low of juvenile delinquents except for the jerks from that house party, Bucky’s settling misdemeanor cases left and right, and now, Maria’s a day or two from pleading out her one nasty robbery trial. Hell, even Phil’s couple weeks of misery are slowing to a crawl; he’s argued most of his pending motions, and at least one defendant’s suddenly switched to a bench trial after deciding the jury might hate him and his sixteen prior convictions. It’s actually kind of nice around the office.

Well, unless you’re prosecuting traffic cases, guys beating their wives, or appeals. ‘Cause Natasha’s almost as buried as Clint is, and Stark’s spent two days locked in his office, leaving only for food and bathroom breaks.

Bruce’s threatened to buy him one of those CamelBak things, but for coffee. Pepper’s threatened a tranquilizer gun.

“I don’t really care if it’s you, Bucky, or even an extra intern—”

“You can have Ward,” Maria says immediately, and Phil sends her a warning look.

“—but I need somebody to at least help me figure out which ones’re gonna go to trial so I can start getting with the clerk and planning those out.” Clint plants a hand on the desk and points to the very last page of cases. “And I figure that at least two-thirds of these’ll be off the docket by the end of the month, meaning—”

“What’s retina-burning orange stand for, again?” Phil asks, peering up at Clint over the rims of his glasses.

Clint grins at him. “The Darcy Special is reserved for the folks who have two weeks to either pay their damn tickets or appear for a trial.” 

Predictably, Phil frowns. Clint watches as he squints at the offense numbers that’re listed next to the case names, ‘cause it’s clear the wheels are turning. “Aren’t two-thirds of these charged as failure to wear a seatbelt?”

“Exactly,” Clint replies, and Maria lets out a sound like some kinda wounded animal before she stalks over to the window. He wonders for a second whether she plans on jumping straight out of it.

Phil shakes his head, obviously as disappointed in humanity as his fellow chief is—the sort of faith Clint lost back in January, when he prosecuted three different _failure to remove car from snow route_ cases—when his phone rings. Maria rests her head against the metal cross-bar between the windows, muttering something under her breath, while Phil punches the speaker phone. “Phil Coulson’s home for the belated realization that people are sometimes stupid.”

On the other side of the line, Peggy Carter snickers. “I was afraid I’d hear something far worse on the other end with Clint in there for so-called case management.”

“I don’t leave them unsupervised anymore,” Maria comments, peeling herself away from the window. 

“It’s _that_ kind of a meeting,” Phil offers in response, and Clint only holds back his laugh because of the way Phil quirks an eyebrow at him.

“I won’t ask,” Peggy decides. He can practically hear her shaking her head. “There’s a Ken Blake from the U.S. Attorney’s Office on the phone for you, Phil. I told him I needed to check whether you were still in your meeting.”

Still standing a foot and a half behind Phil, Maria huffs out the kinda breath usually reserved for when somebody brings Laufeyson up in a conversation. When her hands land on her hips, they grip hard enough to wrinkle her skirt. Clint wonders whether she’ll bruise.

“ _That_ asshole?” she demands.

On the other end of the speaker phone, there’s a heavy pause. “Uhm—”

“I’ll pick up in a minute,” Phil says calmly, cutting Peggy off at the pass. He hangs up the line and then swings his chair around toward Maria. The sharp glance he sends her is perfect Courtroom Coulson, as stern and unyielding as granite. “He’s not an asshole.”

“Really? The guy who thinks he’s god’s gift to criminal prosecution doesn’t qualify as a grade-A dickwad?” Maria jabs an accusatory finger at him. Clint knows from the set of Phil’s jaw that he’s trying not to roll his eyes. “I swear, your taste in friends _and_ men sucked before you got here.”

Clint considers drawing attention to the compliment, but Phil’s already reaching for the receiver. “I did okay for myself,” he informs her as he repositions her chair. 

“Only if _okay_ means ‘I befriended or dated every asshole in the state,’” Maria shoots back. When Phil finally _does_ roll his eyes at her, she scoffs and strides right out of the office. Clint watches as his guy’s expression darkens in annoyance and then relaxes again, almost like someone flipped a switch.

He suspects that there’ll be another Hill-Coulson battle royale at some point in the next couple days. He just hopes Stark’ll lift the _no betting on the guy you bone_ ban, this time around.

But Clint keeps his mouth shut about all that, mostly ‘cause Phil’s hitting the button to pick up a held call and saying, “Hey, Ken, sorry about that, I was in a case management thing— Yeah, I got your e-mail, lemme hear what you’re thinking.” Clint slides the most intrusive page of his spreadsheet outta the way and then starts to stack them up so he can duck out before he overhears the whole conversation. He reaches for his pen, the last hint of his presence in Phil’s office aside from the Christmas picture that Phil’s decided to display next to his computer (embarrassing the shit out of Clint every time he catches sight of it), but Phil catches his wrist. The touch’s soft, but Clint still jerks back a little in surprise.

The phone’s cradled against Phil’s shoulder, muffling some but not all of the rapid-fire talking on the other end, and Phil’s face is soft and warm. 

_We’re leaving at five if it kills me_ , he mouths, slow and deliberate even though the corners of his lips are tilted up into the most addicting little smile.

“If you’re not ready, I might take care of that,” Clint jokes quietly, and as he leaves, he hears Phil explaining that, no, he was chuckling at something other than the phone call.

 

==

 

“But it wasn’t until he said I didn’t understand _Call of Duty_ because of my lack of testosterone that I was actually tempted to lock him in the garage,” Bruce finishes with a shake of his head. He wears his best serious face, his mouth pulled into a tight little frown. Across the booth from him, Natasha quirks both eyebrows as she sips her beer. Clint thinks there might be a grin hidden behind the lip of her glass; he’s only sure of it, though, when Bruce flinches a little and waves his last comment away with a hand. “I won’t actually do it,” he clarifies, “but there’s a part of me that thinks the last thing a thirteen-year-old boy needs is to play war games with his father.”

“Bruce, you’re married to Stark,” Natasha says. She sets her glass down, almost like she’s punctuating her response, and then leans her arms on the table. “No one would be surprised if one day you built him a really nice dog kennel and left him in there at night.”

“Hell, depending on the day, your kid might _help_ ,” Clint tosses out there, and even as he rolls his eyes, Bruce finally submits to a laugh.

Clint’d expected his usual Wednesday night ritual of beers with Natasha and Bruce to end around the same time Bruce’s semester at the law school finished up, what with his cute little twenty-something baby lawyers being released back into the wilds of summer internships and bar exam prep courses. They’d split a giant basket of hot wings on what they thought’d be their last night together for three long months, creating ridiculous plans for their extra ninety minutes of free time on Wednesdays; after a couple beers, Clint’d promised to learn the bagpipes, Bruce’d resolved to clean up more of Tony’s messes, and Natasha, the designated driver for the night, had smirked and refused to tell them anything. Clint’d resigned himself to a summer hiatus—‘til Bruce’d shown up at Clint and Phil’s place right on his usual Wednesday night schedule, his Prius still running in the driveway.

“This new schedule apparently interferes with what Tony calls ‘inappropriate TV and video game night,’” he’d explained, his hands shoved in his pockets. It’d been drizzling and the damp clung to Bruce’s curly hair like something out of a sad movie, and Clint’d bitten down on a grin. “Natasha’s already in the car, but you weren’t answering your cell phone.”

“Yeah, about that,” Clint’d answered, and tried to hide the warmth that rushed up his neck by running fingers through his hair. He’d scrambled for an answer that didn’t involve the truth—a leisurely after-work run with Phil, followed by a less-than-leisurely shower that also involved Phil in all the best ways—but he’d known the second he glanced back at Bruce that his face’d explained enough. He’d rolled his eyes at the other guy’s little smirk of amusement and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Lemme grab my shoes,” he’d replied, and let Bruce step into the foyer before the damp totally deflated his hair.

Five minutes and a couple car horn blasts from Natasha later, and they’d headed off to their favorite dive like nothing’d ever happened.

“Okay,” Natasha says, and sets down her glass again. “Now that we’ve been reminded why _we_ never dated Tony—”

Bruce sighs and rolls his head, but good-naturedly.

“—I think it’s Clint’s turn for angst.”

Clint almost chokes on a mouthful of beer. “Me?” he asks once he’s wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He watches Natasha finish off the last of her dark beer. “I’m angst-free. Ask Darcy. She says it makes me boring.”

Natasha snorts and tosses her curls. You can tell she’s had a rough day by how tangled and unkempt they are. Too much running her fingers through them and too hard an after-work workout to burn off her frustration. “She won’t think you’re boring when you drag her in to work weekends.”

As subtle as he tries to be, it’s impossible to miss Bruce smiling into his drink. His eyes glint like he’s conspiring with his husband—or worse, with his kid. “She had much better words than ‘boring’ to describe me that day I asked her to stay late and help me print out case audits.”

“Yeah, but the difference there is that she _did_ it,” Clint points out. He waves the neck of his beer bottle at the other man and watches him smirk around a sip of his drink. “You ask her to stick around, she smiles and nods. I ask her for anything, it’s excuses. Hair-washing, the cable guy’s coming over—”

“I think her cable actually was out,” Bruce offers with a tiny shrug.

“—her amazing spider-legged hipster boyfriend’s arranged an hour off his late shift so they can have dinner.”

“He has a name,” Natasha reminds him, her chin propped on a hand.

“He still practically hides from me ‘cause I ‘look pissed off all the time,’” Clint shoots back. She tips her head to concede the point. “He talked more to Bruce and Stark’s kid at the housewarming than he talked to me.”

“I’m know I’m biased, but he’s a pretty excellent kid to talk to,” Bruce comments. 

“Except when he’s playing _Call of Duty_ ,” Natasha retorts, and the other guy smiles as he finishes his beer.

The conversation lulls for a couple minutes after the waitress stops by to bring them all fresh beers and their enormous plate of nachos. They munch in comfortable silence until Bruce leans back in the booth and says, “Your division is almost as busy as Tony’s, lately.” Clint keeps eating, almost positive the guy’s talking about Natasha—what with her crazy jury trial and her recent loud fights with complaining witnesses—until somebody kicks him in the shin. He coughs, almost swallowing a whole jalapeno, and shoots Natasha a murderous look. She, in turn, jerks her head toward Bruce. “Natasha’s always switched back and forth between all-time highs or nothing to do,” he clarifies. “This, on the other hand, is new for you.” Clint nods as he necks his drink. “And without the benefit of extensions of time if you’re stressed.”

“Or distracted by sex,” Natasha adds conversationally.

“That was _once_ ,” Clint protests—and realizes too late that the insinuation’s turned Bruce slightly red.

Mature adults they are, they survive about three seconds before they burst out laughing.

They dive the rest of the way into the nachos after that, the conversation meandering as they work to empty the enormous plate of food. Bruce talks about some conference in July he hopes to present at, Natasha complains about Pepper’s extravagant vacation suggestions—“I’m not _against_ going to Italy,” she explains with a shake of her head, “but I’d rather just lie on a beach for a week instead of sight-seeing in the middle of the damn summer”—and Clint admits to his ongoing battle of wills against Phil’s ancient DVR. For once, they’re not talking shop or arguing about the case files that are cluttering up their desks, they’re just enjoying each other’s company.

Halfway through a story about Miles and summer camp—“The real problem started when we told Miles he’d have to narrow it down to four,” Bruce sighs, and Natasha cracks a grin—Clint realizes how comfortable it is to be leaned back in a booth and laughing with his friends. He can’t completely remember how their Wednesday night beer nights started, but he _likes_ having it in his life, the same way he likes muy thai and runs with Wade, bickering conversations with Darcy, and even Stark’s big backyard barbeques. His life when he first showed up at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office feels solitary compared to this one, where Bruce’s wry humor can make him crack up until his sides hurt or where Natasha saves him her jalapenos. 

Never mind the fact that he’s got a guy and a cat at home— _their_ home—who’re probably watching crappy television and trying not to fall asleep with glasses on. Well, Phil is. Despite her habit of running into walls when she’s wound up, the cat can see just fine.

Clint falls far enough into his own thoughts that he almost misses the end of Bruce’s story, but he catches on in time to laugh. Bruce excuses himself to head to the bathroom, and Natasha jerks her head at his back before he’s halfway across the bar. “Did you see that?”

Clint stops crunching on a chip to squint after the guy. “See what?”

“He made it all of ten steps before he pulled out his phone to check in at home.” She shakes her curls as she steals a stray clump of cheese of Clint’s plate. He scowls at her, but he dares not try to steal the prize out of her blood-red nails. “He’s almost as bad as Thor.” 

He snorts at her and helps himself to a homeless olive. Most of what’s left of the nachos is a gelatinous mass of cheese, salsa, and soggy chips. Clint briefly wishes Wade was there, since he’s declared a thousand times that the leftover lump is “the best part.” “Nobody’s as bad as Thor,” he points out. When Natasha raises her eyebrows, he shrugs. “The guy’s got more pictures all over his office than Steve, and Steve’s had five years to build up his collection.”

“Steve’s office is also wallpapered in Dot’s artwork,” she returns.

“Wait ‘til Astrid can hold a pencil,” Clint shoots right back.

Natasha laughs at him, he flops back against the booth and swigs his beer while she pokes at the last couple nachos on her plate. “So,” she comments, her voice carrying a hint of curiosity you can only recognize after several months of _knowing_ her, “you’re really angst free?”

He frowns a little. “What? Don’t trust Darcy’s excellent judgment of my character?”

“I trust Darcy more than I trust you, most days,” she retorts crisply, and he can’t help the chuckle that escapes. He tries to hold onto the solemn expression, but the beer and happiness buzzing around in his veins complicates that. Natasha’s sharp eyes narrow in on him. “You had a big year. Starting with us, the Killgrave trial, the disciplinary issues and your suspension, coming back after . . . ” She trails off, her shrug serving as punctuation. “I just like knowing that everything’s really okay.”

“Nat, you’ve seen when things are _un_ -okay. I think you can tell the difference.” She rolls her eyes at him, complete with a tiny toss of her head, and he leans his arms on the table. When she glances at him again, he thinks he can read concern hidden under her perfect mask. More than anybody he’s ever met, Natasha plays all her cards close to the vest, and the last one to hit the table is _always_ the one where she shows how much she cares. “I’ll admit, traffic court’s a fucking mess right now,” he says after a couple seconds, “and I’m kinda afraid the refinancing lady for Phil’s place is gonna take one look at my credit and ask Phil why the hell he’d date somebody who clearly can’t manage his damn money.” She snorts a laugh, but her shoulders soften. “But for once, all things considered, I think things are going pretty okay.”

For a few seconds, he expects her to quirk an eyebrow and question him some more, but then, her expression relaxes. She nods once, the sorta curt bob of her head she uses when she’s finished with a witness, and picks up her beer. “It’s a good feeling,” she informs him, toasting the air with a little wrist flourish.

“What feeling?” Bruce asks. Clint scoots over to let him have his half of the bench back.

“The feeling that your life’s not about to implode all around you.”

“That’s not what I said,” Clint protests, but she smiles knowingly and sips her beer.

Bruce, on the other hand, sighs. “I used to know what that felt like,” he says. He couples it with a shake of his head and a slightly-sad expression. Clint gapes at him for a second, then glances at Natasha, who lifts her shoulder in a helpless shrug. They watch as he sips his beer and says absolutely nothing else.

Finally, Clint pulls in a breath. “But?” 

The tiny smile that nudges at the corners of Bruce’s mouth is nothing compared to the glint in his eyes. “You have met my husband, haven’t you?” he asks—and then, he jerks in surprise from Natasha kicking him under the table.

“You deserved that,” she declares, and Clint swears he’ll throw up from laughing so hard.

 

==

 

“I swear to fucking god, I am going to light someone on fire,” Clint mutters under his breath as Darcy hands him the next traffic file.

Friday afternoon traffic docket is usually one of Clint’s favorite parts of the week, a span of two hours where, no matter what happens, he leaves feeling like he’s accomplished something. The fastest way to clear cases off his spreadsheet is by plastering on a happy face and playing “let’s make a deal” with all the defendants who show up with their crumpled traffic tickets and a healthy fear of what happens next. Unlike Natasha’s spouse-beaters and Phil and Maria’s hardened felons, traffic defendants aren’t _bad_ people as much as they are folks who don’t think about the natural consequences of their actions—like, say, speeding in a construction zone without proof of insurance on them. Most the time, they just want a lower fine and to avoid the couple days’ jail time that’s associated with things like driving on a suspended license. 

Most of the time.

Today is definitely _not_ most of the time.

Today is a fifty-three defendant docket, the longest that Clint’s ever suffered through and definitely the most intense. By the time he and Darcy’d headed down toward the hallway to check people in and start the conversations about plea deals—because seriously, who wants to fully contest a ticket for rolling through a stop sign?—there’d been a small crowd outside Judge English’s courtroom. Worse, about half the crowd’d consisted of _lawyers_ , which meant every damn conversation Clint attempted included terms like “miscarriage of justice” and “insufficient evidence.” One of the attorneys even called his client’s ticket for passing in a no-passing zone “completely spurious,” leading Darcy to look the word up on her phone.

“It means ‘false,’” she’d hissed at him while he’d scribbled notes on the conversation into the case file.

He’d shot her a dirty look. “I’m not an idiot,” he’d informed her, and then handed her a bunch of folders and told her to go talk to the folks _without_ attorneys about their options.

Dockets usually feel like cattle calls, but Bruce—who’d emerged from the elevator banks to help with crowd control before Judge English’s assistant open up the courtroom—kept comparing the experience to herding cats. For the first time in his life, Clint’d kinda agreed.

He’d tried to make sure that either he or Darcy met with most of the fifty-three ticket-clutching defendants before Judge English showed up, but he’d known by about person number five that they’d failed miserably. He’s already talked three defendants back through the conversations he personally had with them—he knows because he wrote it all down—and that’s not counting the couple attorneys who’ve creatively re-interpreted their hallway plea deals.

“Case number 13-0734TR, State versus Kevin Daugherty,” Clint reads off, and the next defendant pulls himself up out of the gallery and saunters over. He’s young, dressed in slouchy jeans and a too-big t-shirt, and there’re tattoos curling around his wrists and up his arms. He nods toward Clint and Darcy, and Clint tries very hard not to roll his eyes. “Defendant appears in person, _pro se_ , and he’s charged with—”

“Can I ask a question?” Daugherty interrupts, and Clint jerks his head away from the charging document to stare at the guy. The tattoo on his neck proclaims “Mama” in looping script; Clint only notices it because the defendant’s standing totally still in front of the podium with his attention trained entirely on Judge English.

Judge English blinks at him, clearly caught off guard, and presses her lips into a tight line. Clint really hopes she’ll tell the defendant to save his questions for after the hearing. Instead, she says, “You may.”

“Why can’t the hot chick lawyer do my case? ‘Cause she’s the one I talked to in the hall. It’s only fair she should be the one telling me how much trouble I’m gonna be in.”

In the half-second it takes Clint to shift his attention from Daugherty to Darcy, Darcy’s face flushes bright, tomato red. She immediately dips her whole face, an attempt to hide her embarrassment, but the damage is already done; Judge English’s jaw clenches into a tight line while Daugherty smirks like he just pulled off some sorta magic trick. “Your honor,” Clint says immediately, “the State isn’t exactly comfortable with Mister Daugherty’s inappropriate comments, and—”

“I agree with you, Mister Barton,” the judge cuts him off, and Clint releases a breath he didn’t entirely realize he’d sucked in. Next to him, Darcy scrubs a hand through her curls. They stick up in funny tendrils afterward, but at least her face is returning to its normal color. “Mister Daugherty, you’ll direct your comments to Mister Barton, and unless you have a pertinent question, you’ll keep your mouth shut the rest of the time.”

Daugherty’s smirk disappears instantly. For a second, Clint watches the angry flush climb out of his collar and past the “Mama” tattoo and he thinks maybe the guy might lose his temper.

Instead, he tosses his head and scoffs. “Whatever, man,” he grumbles, and Clint jumps right back in to reading his charges.

The next three defendants after Daugherty all come with a wide variety of lawyers and dispositions. Sif shows up, so spitting mad about her client’s ticket for reckless driving that she bangs her hand on the podium and demands a jury trial; immediately after she leaves, Laufeyson swirls in, a symphony of expensive clothes and slicked-back hair, and demands dismissal of his client’s ticket for speeding and failure to wear a seatbelt.

“For the record,” Clint says, his hands planted on counsel table, “we offered Mister Laufeyson’s client a plea deal in which we’d dismiss the speeding charge and only make him pay the fine for the seatbelt.”

“A ludicrous offer that ignores the specious nature of State’s case, your honor,” Laufeyson shoots back immediately. Clint grits his teeth. “Why not offer a starving man a single breadcrumb while ignoring his hunger, or a freezing man a scrap of a blanket while ignoring his—”

“It’s a fifteen dollar ticket instead of a hundred-dollar one,” Clint breaks in, mostly because he can’t stand to listen to another half-second of Laufeyson’s monologue. Laufeyson whips his head around, his snake eyes gleaming with anger. “If your client’s not interested in the deal, fine, but your analogy’s kinda—”

“My analogy,” Laufeyson immediately interrupts, “is meant to demonstrate the extreme injustice of offering an innocent man a plea deal for two offenses which he did _not_ commit.”

“To _traffic_ offenses, not—”

“Mister Barton,” Judge English breaks in, and Clint snaps his mouth shut. He grips his pen hard enough that he swears he can feel it start to curve, and then puts it down on the table. Judge English glances across the well of the courtroom, over at Laufeyson and his well-dressed client, and finally sighs. “I’ll set this for trial, then?” she asks.

“Absolutely, your honor,” Laufeyson replies. He snaps his briefcase shut like an exclamation mark. “We will be sending the State our discovery requests within the hour.”

“Of course you will,” Clint mutters. He only realizes that the judge’s heard him after she sends him another dirty look.

Clint loses track of the different defendants after that, falling easily into the regular rhythm of a typical docket. The cases run together, cogs in the wheel of his usual routine; he flips open the folder, calls the case, reads the charges, explains whatever agreement they’ve reached. The bucket in front of him starts emptying, and even though Darcy needs to toss one pen to the side and start over with a fresh one ‘cause she runs out of ink, the insanity slows to a dull roar.

At least, mostly. 

“Case number 13-0765TR, State versus Robert Louis Drake,” he reads after he flips open the next folder. It’s automatic, really, almost entirely without him thinking about it—at least, until he blinks at the familiarity of the name. He squints at the guy’s personal information, trying put two-and-two together, but he can’t quite—

“Hyphen McCoy!” a voice chimes in, and Clint closes his eyes when all the pieces fall suddenly into place. Wade Wilson crosses into the well of the courtroom, wearing pants and a jacket that are two noticeably different shades of black. His shirt’s covered in tiny flowers, but at least it matches his yellow tie. He drops his bag on the chair at defense counsel table and drops a case file on the podium.

Judge English glances up from the file on the bench. “Excuse me?”

“It’s Drake hyphen McCoy, your honor,” Wade says again.

“There’s really no hyphen,” the guy behind him protests as he steps up to counsel table. He’s dressed like he shops from the Steve Rogers collection: light blue shirt, tan slacks, perpetually-embarrassed expression. Then again, Clint might feel the same if his criminal defense attorney’d started arguing the better points of hyphens in front of the judge.

The judge’s face pinches. “Appearances,” she instructs tightly.

“Oh, yeah, right.” Beside Clint, Darcy sighs a little and shakes her head. “Wade Winston Wilson appears in person and with his client, Bobby Drake.”

Judge English nods, just the once, and Clint tries not to echo Darcy’s sigh as he reads off the charging document. “Your honor, Mister Drake is charged with driving thirty-five miles per hour in a school zone. Because this is more than five miles per hour over the school zone limit, it is a moving violation with a tier C fine.”

“Yeah, about that,” Wade jumps in, and the judge raises her eyes from the file in front of her. “My client is _really_ sorry and super embarrassed, so if we could just—”

“I only need to know what your client’s plan for his case is, Mister Wilson,” Judge English interrupts.

Wade snaps his jaw shut and glances at Drake. If the guy shoved his hands any deeper into his pockets, he’d rip right through and be fisting his thighs. Clint almost feels bad about the whole thing. “We talked to the district attorney’s office on Wednesday. Well, I mean, Bobby did. I didn’t. But whatever, I think our plan is that we’re gonna go for either a diversion or a plea deal.” Drake nods slightly. “I was kind of hoping maybe somebody here, today, could sort that out for us.”

“Uh,” Clint says, and then glances down at the page of notes attached to the case file. He can feel his entire face tightening, but that’s mostly because he’s stuck trying to read Darcy’s ridiculous handwriting. He leans down, squinting at the loopy letters in bright pink pen.

He only notices that Darcy’s right next to him when she hisses, “This is why your boyfriend tells you to bring your reading glasses to work.”

Clint considers telling her to shut up, but his brain finally processes the words in front of him and he ends up snapping his head up to look at her, instead. “Did you talk directly _to_ him?” he asks.

“To who?”

“To the defendant.” He jabs his finger under what looks like Darcy’s creative interpretation of a date. “Did you actually talk to him about how we could settle the case?”

She glances down at his finger before nodding. “Yeah, I talked to Bobby while you were in that meeting with Maria and Phil. I didn’t realize Wade was his attorney then, but—”

“You didn’t ask?” Clint retorts. Darcy stares at him, unblinking, and he barely manages to stand on a heavy sigh. He rolls his lips together and tries to count ten, but she keeps frowning at him like he’s speaking to her in code. “Darcy, you can’t talk to a represented defendant. You have to _ask_ them, and if they have an attorney—”

“Yeah, but I just assumed—”

“You can’t just assume, you have to—”

“Mister Barton?” Judge English asks, and Clint resists his urge to close his eyes. He suddenly feels dead on his feet; Wade’s case, he decides, is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Darcy glances at the floor and says absolutely nothing else, and Clint instantly knows he’ll pay for scolding her later.

He forces a little smile as he turns back toward the judge. “The State’d be fine with pleading it down to ordinary speeding,” he says. His voice sounds strained even to his own ears. “We’ll get with Mister Wilson and his client after docket and work it out.”

“High-five!” Wade announces, his voice effectively covering Judge English’s curt thanks.

“No, Wade,” Drake replies immediately, and walks right out of the courtroom.

The last handful of straggler defendants—most of whom showed up late and who start their conversation in front of the court talking about “that curly-haired guy in the hallway”—mostly behave okay, except for one guy who refuses to take off his baseball cap until the judge threatens him with contempt of court. Darcy keeps her head down and takes meticulous notes; Clint’s not sure whether he should interpret it as an apology, but he decides it’s better than pushing the whole thing and landing on her bad side. 

After what seems like an eternity, the basket of file folders is finally empty. Judge English sounds both tired and pissed off when she adjourns court and leaves the bench, her assistant scurrying after her like a little gray-haired mouse. Darcy immediately starts cleaning up the mess of files that’re stacked all over the table, _still_ not speaking to Clint at all, and Clint sighs. He wishes that Phil was in the office instead of away at an ethics CLE, because god knows he could use somebody who’s actually good at serving as a mentor to help him talk to Darcy. 

He’s not the teacher type. He’s pretty sure he’ll _never_ be the teacher type, actually.

“Listen,” he says as Darcy chases down a pen that fell off the table, and she jerks her head up to look at him. He can’t decide if the flash of fire in her eyes is an act or not. As much as she plays up the whole “what you see is what you get” routine, he knows that there’s actually a lot brewing beneath the surface. “Monday, why don’t we sit down and talk about some of the stuff that’s in the intern handbook? Just a quick overview of the greatest hits.”

She narrows her eyes at him, her whole face tightening, and Clint thinks for a second she might actually explode at him. Instead, though, she asks, “You think Hill did a ‘greatest hits’ overview with Mister Perfect?”

Clint snorts. “No, I think she made him rewrite every page with that weird self-harm quill from Harry Potter.” Darcy stares at him for a beat too long before she actually laughs. Clint accepts the victory and grins at her. “And that was before the big three-part test over the whole thing.”

“Did he have to do the third part standing on his head?” 

“While wearing those goggles that simulate drunkenness and listening to Natasha’s Russian opera, I think.” Darcy cackles as she shoves the loose pen in her pocket, and Clint stuffs the last few files in the big metal container they use to lug them around. “Think you can handle that, ‘hot lawyer chick?’”

She freezes, her hand halfway curled around one of the handles on their traffic crate, and her smile disappears in the second before she glares at him. “You call me that again, I’ll do worse than tattoo your neck,” she informs him, and Clint laughs as she sweeps all their supplies off the table and sashays out of the courtroom like she owns the place.

She’ll be a good lawyer someday, he thinks.

Out in the hallway, Wade and his friend are sharing one of the benches along the wall. The annoying, tinny Candy Crush music tinkles out of Wade’s cell phone, and he swears at the game as he flicks candies into color-coordinated lines. Clint only knows about the game because of his friends; Wade and Darcy both play with terrifying regularity, and Stark occasionally rants about it being a “poor man’s Bejeweled,” whatever that means.

Robert Drake stands up the second he spots Clint, but Wade keeps on playing. “Wade,” he hisses, and kicks the guy lightly in the shin.

Wade jerks his head up, glances at Clint, and then shrugs. “You’re a lawyer too, you know,” he points out. His eyes fall back to his cell phone screen, and Clint suspects that Drake’s trying very hard not to roll his eyes. “I’m only here to make sure you don’t get a raw deal. And you won’t, because it’s Clint and I’m right here.”

“You don’t have magical proximity powers,” Drake informs him, his hands falling to his hips. He apparently also buys his facial expressions from the Steve Rogers collection, because he appears both frustrated and disapproving in equal parts.

Wade shrugs. “We don’t know that I don’t.”

“Uh, I’ll step in before you murder him,” Clint offers, holding up a hand. The corner of Wade’s mouth kicks up in a grin, and Drake flashes him another razor-sharp glare. “Not that anybody’d blame you, I just really don’t want to witness a crime.”

The comment apparently catches the guy off guard, because he suddenly forgets about Wade and whips his head around to face Clint. For the first time, Clint notices how young he is, with his mess of dirty blond hair and his ice blue eyes. He’s probably even a year or two younger than Wade, even if he dresses like he’s in his fifties.

“Sorry,” he apologizes, his hands sliding from his hips and into his pockets.

“Are you kidding? I’ve met Wade. I know what he’s like.” When Clint flashes him a smile, Drake smiles back; still on the bench, Wade flashes them both a thumbs-up. Clint smacks him with his legal pad before he tosses it in the bare space next to Wade and flips open Drake’s case file. “So, we don’t wanna go to trial on speeding in a school zone,” he reads from Darcy’s messy notes. She’s great at multitasking until you force her to write while also talking. Another skill for them to work on, Clint supposes. “I’m not entirely sure what Miss Lewis told you, but—”

“You can call her Darcy,” Wade interrupts, and they both turn to glance at him. He raises his eyes from his phone for a split-second and then shrugs. “We’ve all shared a bottle of wine in his creepy cow kitchen, so he knows she’s Darcy. You don’t need to pretend she’s _not_ Darcy to someone who knows for sure that she _is_ Darcy.”

Clint watches as Drake’s jaw tightens until it’s as hard and sharp as a glacier. “Wade?”

“What?”

“Please stop talking.”

A surprised bark of laughter leaps out of Clint’s mouth without his permission, and he presses his lips into a tight line to keep another one from escaping. Drake looks frustrated and embarrassed more than anything else, and Wade— Well, because he’s _Wade_ , the guy grins like a Cheshire cat and returns to his damn video game. Clint forces himself to swallow his amusement as he turns his attention back to the case file. “I’m fine with amending this down to ordinary speeding and just letting you pay the ticket,” he says once Drake’s finished glaring at his attorney. “It looks like you got caught right before the school zone speed limit expired, and we didn’t find any prior traffic infractions on your record.”

Drake releases a long breath. “Thank you.”

“We’ll file everything for you, and the court’ll send you a letter. You won’t even need to come back in.” Wade suddenly swears at his phone and shakes it as though that’ll help him with his Candy Crush problems, and Clint can’t help the grin that twitches at the corner of his mouth. “Unless you want another shot at Wade as your lawyer.”

“Uh, no,” Drake replies, and Clint laughs at how Wade sputters and scoffs from behind his stupid cell phone. He leaves them to bicker about Wade’s effectiveness as an attorney—and Drake must know the guy’s good, insanity aside, or otherwise he wouldn’t’ve brought him along to his court date—and heads back up to the office. He’s got a lot of amendments and dismissals to write, most of which Darcy can’t do without his help.

She’s already sorting through the files when he makes it upstairs; before he can ask what the piles each mean, she picks up a stack and shoves it at him. “These all need the amendments I’m not allowed to sign off on,” she informs him quickly. He opens his mouth to respond, but she flips another file shut and shoves it on top of his stack. “I’ll start on the motions to dismiss.”

“You’re being, uh, weirdly punctual today,” he informs her.

She smacks him with a file before adding it to the stack closest to her keyboard. “Unlike some of us, my boyfriend’s not off being an ethics nerd today and so I need to leave at five,” she retorts, and hands him one more file before he manages to escape.

He dumps the stack on the corner of his desk and wriggles his mouse to wake up his computer when he notices that his cell phone has a missed text message waiting for him. He unlocks his phone and then scowls at the message.

**Phil Coulson:** _So, how’d traffic go?_

Clint rolls his eyes as he thumbs open a response. _don’t even talk to me_ , he shoots right back, and he knows from the pause between his reply and the winking face that Phil’s probably sitting in the back of some room at the law school, laughing. 

 

==

 

It’s well after six that night before Clint feels like he can leave with a clean conscience. He considers leaving a half-dozen times before then—first when Darcy leaves around four-thirty, then at five, then when Phil texts him to say he’s leaving his CLE, then when Bruce and Tony stop by to say their goodnights—but every time, he stares at the leaning tower of file folders on the corner of his desk, sighs, and jumps right back into work. He finishes all the amended documents he needs to prepare, updates his case spreadsheet and e-mails it off to Hill—no use in wasting the storage space on Outlook when he can just tell Phil at home—and reviews the files for the couple DUI plea hearings scheduled on Monday and Tuesday. His inbox’s mostly empty by the time he actually switches off the light, and he leaves a couple folders on Darcy’s chair, complete with post-it instructions. On an afterthought, he steals Darcy’s intern manual out from under three empty Starbucks cup and a Pinkie Pie action figure. After all, if he’s gonna talk to her about the rules, he figures he might as well learn them.

It’s a bright, sunny May evening outside the courthouse, complete with a warm breeze and the shouts of kids playing in the park, and Clint strips off his suit jacket on his way down the back stairs. He and Phil’d texted back and forth about grilling burgers or something on the patio, and now that he’s outside, that’s all Clint wants in the world: cold beer, rickety lawn furniture on their uneven patio, and Phil’s grin as he slightly-burns everything on his old charcoal Weber.

He almost stops to pull out his phone and text Phil exactly that when somebody behind him asks, “You’re the prosecutor on my case, right?”

Clint nearly falls off the last step down to the sidewalk as he whirls around and suddenly comes face-to-face with a teenage girl. She’s wearing jeans and a lavender tank top that shows off long, pale arms, her dark hair pulled into one of those side-braids like the girl from the _Hunger Games_ movie, and Clint recognizes her two seconds too late.

He glances over his shoulder, then up the stairs, but there’s nobody else in site. “Miss Bishop, I can’t talk to you without your attorney, and since I don’t see him—”

“Yeah, I know how that works,” Kate cuts him off with a little wave of her hands. She crosses her arms over her chest and then casts her eyes at the ground. She’s wearing high-top sneakers, the kind that Clint’s seen the crazy music videos Darcy watches sometimes. He wonders for a second who _exactly_ this kid is: the girl in the school uniform, the pumps-wearing young adult in the courtroom, or a stylish teenager with Katniss Everdeen hair.

Either way, he wets his lips. “Did you maybe have a meeting with him here or something?” he guesses, because he’s honestly clueless as to why a sixteen-year-old’d spend her Friday afternoon lurking around the back of the judicial complex.

Kate snorts at him. “With Tanner? Uh, no. His office is in a high-rise. My dad dragged me there for a _very_ stern talking-to.” She flips her braid off her shoulder and jerks her head up to look at him. “Can I get rid of him?”

“Of who?” Clint asks. “Your lawyer?”

“Yeah. I know the judge said I’m stuck with him, but I think it’s pretty dumb that I have to put up with a lawyer I hate just because my dad’s shelling out the cash for him.” Her arms tighten, and Clint watches as she presses her nails into her forearms. “He’s one of my step-mom’s friends, which makes him about as useless as a person can _get_ , never mind—”

“Kate,” he interrupts. He’s not sure he means to use her first name—it borders right on the cusp of unprofessional, not unlike their conversation—but he can’t entirely help it. In the shadow of the building, she looks simultaneously sixteen and thirty-six, and he can’t for the life of him figure out why. “If you have a problem with Mister Sullivan, you have to talk to him and your dad. I can’t help you. I can’t technically even talk to you right now.”

Kate flips her braid again. It swings like a pendulum behind her back. “I thought prosecutors are supposed to be all about justice.”

“We are, but—”

“Oh, never mind,” she cuts him off. He opens his mouth to finish his previous thought, but she jerks her head toward the flowerbeds, and Clint rolls his lips together instead. He nods at her a little and steps off the stairs onto the sidewalk. His car’s one of about ten left in the parking lot; there’s a purple Volkswagen a couple spots down from him that he knows without thinking belongs to Kate.

He stares at it for a second too long, his fingers curled around the strap of his bag, before he finally turns back around. “Write a letter to the court,” he says. Kate snaps her head back in his direction, her stance softening slightly, and he sighs. “If you have a problem with your attorney that you think he and your dad aren’t hearing, write a letter and explain it to Judge Smithe. I can’t promise it’ll do anything, but it’s better than nothing.”

There’s a brief moment where all she does is stare at him before, slowly, she nods. “Okay,” she says after a couple extra beats of silence, the wind rustling in the bushes and trees around the judicial complex. “I can do that.”

“Okay,” he echoes. He watches as her lips press into this small smile, but it never quite reaches her eyes. He thinks maybe something darker flashes across her expression—something lost and helpless that he can’t name—but it slips away before he can be certain. “I really can’t talk to you about anything else,” he stresses after a few more seconds of silence. “I could get in a lot of trouble. And technically, so could you.”

Kate rolls her eyes. “Like I’m not in enough trouble already,” she shoots back. She hops the last two steps until she’s standing right in front of Clint, her chin tipped up almost defiantly. Clint forces a little smile at her and resists the urge to step back, away from her sharp gaze. “You don’t totally suck,” she decides.

He snorts at her. “I know a lot of people who’d disagree with that,” he jokes, and he watches her grin at him again before she steps off the curb and heads out into the parking lot.

He stands on the sidewalk until her Volkswagen squeals around the corner and away, a purple streak that rockets recklessly out into traffic. As he heads out to his own car, he tries to shove their conversation into a tiny compartment and wall it off, but he fails miserably. By the time he’s dropped into the front seat of his car and started the engine, he’s analyzed every nuance of Kate’s body language and tone within an inch of its life. 

He’s not sure why he’s so caught up in her appearance, or why that surprise slowly morphs into worry the more he thinks about it.

Phil’s already started the grill by the time he walks into the house, and Clint kisses him long and lazy before he heads into the bedroom to change. Phil’s streaming one of his Pandora stations, this eclectic mix of artists that no sane human would ever combine, and Clint cackles as he listens to his guy sing along to some horrible Jimmy Buffet song.

“I’m dating somebody’s middle-aged dad!” he yells out the bedroom window, and then listens to Phil’s laugh echo across their backyard.

He’s standing in the bedroom, his crappy weekend jeans on but unbuttoned and in desperate need of a shirt when a thought occurs to him. He digs his cell phone out of his work pants and thumbs through his contacts list, flipping through what feels like a thousand last names that start with J before he finally finds the one he’s looking for.

“Your beer’s getting warm!” Phil calls through to him as he bangs back into the house for something.

“I’ll be there in a second!” Clint yells back without looking up from his keyboard. By the time he’s done, his e-mail to Jessica Jones simply reads:

_I had a weird run-in with Kate Bishop today and I’d like to talk to you about it. If you have a couple minutes on Monday to call or stop by, that’d be great. Thanks in advance._

He reads it over a couple times, then signs his name and sends it. By the time he makes it out to the patio, Phil’s already tossed the burgers on the grill. Clint finishes buttoning his jeans and bypasses the unopened beer on the crappy plastic patio table to steal Phil’s right out of his fingers and help himself to a swig. Once he’s swallowed, he helps himself to a kiss, too, and savors the fact that Phil smells like charcoal and tastes like hops.

Phil smiles at him when he pulls away, looking tan and perfect in the setting sunlight. “Long day?” he asks.

“You have no idea,” he replies, and kisses Phil again like it’s a way to forget.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter is inspired from a line from the musical _A Man of No Importance_.
> 
> In case you missed it, last week's holiday story was ["The Cosmos, and Everything Beneath"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1080906) and featured Loki, Jane, Thor, Astrid, and Frigga. This week's is ["The First Christmas"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1090407) and features the Banner-Stark household.
> 
> I also wrote an anniversary ficlet to celebrate Bruce and Tony's wedding anniversary on December 16, 2013 (also known as "this past Monday"). You can find it [here](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/70245175253/happy-anniversary-bruce-tony).


	5. Instinct

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, two conversations about Kate Bishop leave Clint torn between two masters: his instincts, and the facts of this case.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t know how much Jessica Jones is toeing the line toward “breaking the rules.” I trust her not to do anything too stupid.
> 
> More information on Jessica’s small therapy group can be found in the short story [“The Survivability Thesis.”](https://archiveofourown.org/works/761734)
> 
> Thanks, as always, to my beta-readers (Jen and saranoh, in case you've forgotten), whose instincts in finding errors and problems constantly cultivate me into a better writer.

“To be fair,” Jessica Jones says, cupping the Suffolk County Against Child Abuse 2009 mug between her palms, “I called Tanner Sullivan’s office four different times, and his secretary kept finding new excuses. One—and I’m not joking, here—involved a standing squash match.” Clint chokes a little on a sip of his own coffee, which causes Jones to grin over the lip of her mug. There’s a glint in her eyes, something quick-silver and clever, and Clint instantly decides that he likes her. “I don’t trust anybody under the age of thirty who has their own secretary.”

“I’m pretty sure firms like that hand out secretaries like Halloween candy,” Clint replies with a shrug.

“Then I know where I’m taking my toddler trick-or-treating in the fall,” she deadpans, and Clint can’t help his laugh.

It’s a rainy Monday morning in Suffolk County, the kind where you wake up and immediately want to climb right back into bed. Clint’d grumbled about it when the alarm went off, tugging the covers up over his head and demanding five more minutes, but Phil’d just untucked the sheets at the bottom of the bed and let his feet get cold while he went to make their coffee. Clint’d watched fat droplets run down the windowpanes in their bedroom as he dressed, doing up his buttons to the rhythmic drumming of rain against the gutters and the distant rumble of thunder.

“Making people go to work in weather like this should be illegal,” he’d complained after they’d watched a two-door Honda nearly float away while turning a corner through a puddle of standing water.

“I’ll be sure to tell the legislature,” Phil’d replied calmly, and Clint’d stolen his thermos for the rest of the drive.

He’d hardly settled into his desk chair with a couple doughnut holes stolen from the break room and a cup of Thor’s enamel-stripping coffee when Darcy’d popped her head in, announced that a “cranky woman in a raincoat” had shown up to see him, and disappeared again.

Jones’s raincoat is now hanging in the conference room, one of the many casualties of the spring rain. She crosses her legs and bounces one foot, complete with a truly sodden sneaker. Clint tries very hard not to smile at that as he reaches for his legal pad. “You know you’ll need to tell Mister Sullivan everything you tell me,” he comments as he grabs a pen.

“If he calls me back? Sure.” Clint feels himself frown, but when he glances across the desk at Jones, she’s already waving a hand. “I know the rules, Mister Barton. Just like you know there are some things about Kate Bishop that I can’t tell you.”

“But you’re her social worker,” he points out, and she shrugs a single shoulder in reply. She’s wearing a striped top that balances precariously on the line between t-shirt and blouse. For a second, she actually reminds him a little of Darcy: messy hair, comfortable clothes, sneakers when she can get away with it. “I’m not an expert on juvenile cases, but I’m pretty sure social workers testify all the time.”

“In a child welfare case, yes,” Jones replies. She sips her coffee again and then sets it down on the edge of Clint’s desk. She watches him briefly, her dark eyes steady and careful, and then leans back in her chair. “But technically, I’m Kate’s therapist, not her social worker. And that, combined with the fact that this isn’t a child welfare case, means I can’t spill all the beans. Child services doesn’t have a dog in this fight.”

“But if it’s relevant to her charges—”

Jones raises her hands. “I’m with you, here,” she interrupts with a little shake of her head, “and trust me when I say that I care a lot about this kid. I will tell you everything I can within the bounds of both our ethics codes, and if Sullivan ever calls me back, I’ll do the same for him.” She scrubs a hand through her hair. “But I can’t write you a neat little ten-page report on the enigma that is Kate Bishop and call it good. Not that ten pages would be nearly enough.”

“No kidding,” Clint mutters, and he only realizes that Jones’s heard him after she cracks a smile. A low growl of thunder echoes behind the window as he settles back in his chair; across from him, she picks up her coffee mug again. “But she’s in therapy with you.”

Jones nods.

“For how long?”

“Since about mid-January,” she answers. When Clint raises his eyebrows at her, she waves a hand. “I run a therapy group with about seven kids,” she clarifies. “Some come every week and some drift in and out. Kate was referred to me before the end of last year, but it took a couple weeks for her to warm up to the group.” 

He drags his legal pad down to the edge of the desk so he can scratch that down. He scribbles Kate’s name at the top of the page while Jones sips her coffee. “Any reason why it took her so long?”

“She’s sixteen,” Jones responds immediately. Clint glances up from his legal pad just in time to watch her sigh. “Do you remember being sixteen at all? Because I’m pretty sure neither of us would’ve been in a hurry to sit down and spill our guts with a bunch of our peers at that age.” He nods a little, but before he can transition into his next question, Jones dips her head to look at her mug. He watches her brow furrow in consideration, and he presses his lips into a tight line. “Most the kids in my group are not there voluntarily. A couple are under court order, a couple others are from families that’ve had some trouble and so while it’s not an order, it’s a last ditch effort to keep the kid _in_ the home and out of the system.” She raises her head to meet his eyes. “Kate doesn’t really fit into either of those categories.”

“Meaning?” 

“And _that_ is one of those places where I feel like being a therapist trumps being a court-friendly social worker.” He snorts at her, and she flashes him a quick, sharp smile that Natasha’d envy. “I will say that since the end of January, she’s made every session.”

Clint adds that to the legal pad, automatically asking, “And she’s made progress?”

“Trump card,” Jones replies instantly, and sips her coffee.

He finishes up his newest note and then sits back in his chair, considering. “This is new for her,” he says, and he’s surprised it’s not a question. He’s not alone in that, either; Jones raises her eyebrows for a half-second before her lips purse together in a small frown. “I met her once before, a while back,” he admits, “and she doesn’t seem like the same kid to me. That, plus the way she holds herself in court, and I don’t think she spends a lot of time beating her classmates’ heads in.”

Jones’s eyes narrow. “Do you have a lot of experience watching sixteen-year-olds squirm in court for the first time?” she questions.

Clint thinks back for a couple seconds to the first time the cops picked Barney up for smoking pot. Trick’d been angrier than anybody in the park’d ever seen him, and he’d dragged Clint outta school to sit him in the back of the courtroom while some old prosecutor rattled off the charges. “You and your piece of shit brother are fuckin’ worthless,” he’d grumbled before standing up and explaining how “the juvenile” belonged at home with him. Clint’d listened to their heavy silence the whole way home on the bus, and then their knock-down drag-out fight about Trick needing the state money he got to take care of the both of them—something he’d lose if Barney landed in juvie.

Barney’d left that night and stayed gone for a week.

Clint’d been twelve.

He shrugs and pretends to add something to his last line of notes. “Something like that,” he replies.

“Well, you’re not wrong,” Jones says after a couple more seconds. She settles her coffee mug against her thigh and shakes her head. “Kate can be— I think the best word for it is ‘combative,’ but that’s still not quite right. She’s sixteen, so of course she expects everyone to adopt her worldview, but she also expects people to live up to it.” Clint stops writing to glance up at the woman across from him, and she scratches a hand through her hair. “Do you remember being six and thinking all your teachers lived at school?” 

Clint considers telling her that, when he was six, he went to a Catholic school attached to the orphanage and all the teachers were nuns who lived in a weird little apartment building back behind the church. Instead, though, he nods. “Sure.”

“Kate’s got the teenage version of that, only with her moral code, and she applies it to just about everyone she meets.” 

He’s still not entirely sure what Jones means, but as soon as he opens his mouth to _ask_ , he’s interrupted by three rapid taps on his office door. He shifts to call out that he’s in a meeting, but before he can speak, Tony saunters into his office. He’s wearing a button-down with his sleeves rolled up, his hair wild and disheveled, and he walks in without looking up from the papers in his hand. “Barton, I need to pick your brain on this DUI thing,” he greets, and Clint watches as Jones’s mouth curves into a tiny, wry smile. “Because at this point, it reads like I’m a first-year trying to seduce my legal writing TA with the size of my brain instead of just relying on the size of my—”

Stark freezes mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open and his eyes about ready to bug out of his head, and Clint realizes belatedly that it’s because of Jessica Jones. The social worker leans back in her chair and crosses her arms, the smile creeping slowly into her eyes; Stark, on the other hand, backs away from her. He flaps his papers in a rough sign of the cross before announcing, “We have papers that say he’s ours, no take-backs.”

Jones laughs and shakes her head. “Nice to see you too, Tony.”

“Wait,” Clint interrupts, watching as Tony’s surprise slowly melts into cautious optimism. “You two know each other?”

“Uh, did you not pay attention to the whole ‘our child arrived not by stork but by case manager’ part of my and Bruce’s epic story?” Tony demands. He rolls his stack of paper up into a cylinder and lightly pokes it into Jones’s arm; she swats at him, and he jerks back another half-step. “Because if I need to be the one to explain where foster babies come from, we have a problem.”

Jones rolls her eyes. “I was Miles’s case worker before they adopted him.”

“And she still sends my arguably better half e-mails about important child welfare things that I never read over his shoulder, but that is neither here nor there.” Before Clint can either crack a smile or roll his eyes, Tony tosses the packet of papers on his desk. “Read, rip apart, report back. Bonus points if you can stick the phrase ‘and that’s why you’re wrong, you jackass’ in there somewhere.”

“Does he always hand off his work to other attorneys?” Jones asks.

“Only in days that end in ‘y,’” Clint returns. Tony purposely scoffs, rolling his head back like the world’s worst amateur actor; Clint, however, just moves the packet from the middle of his desk to his inbox. “I have a job of my own, you know.”

“Shaming little old ladies into paying their reckless driving tickets, yeah, I know.” Tony waves a hand. “Watch out for this one, Jessica. Leave the parking lot without signaling and he’ll call the county sheriff to write you up.”

“Says the guy who hands cops his license, registration, and district attorney’s business card,” Clint retorts.

“That was _once_ ,” Tony insists, but Jones is already laughing. She picks up her coffee mug while Tony jabs a finger in Clint’s direction. “Your little Wednesday night shindigs are turning into the reason why I can’t have nice things.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about and I still doubt that,” Jessica says, gesturing with her mug.

“You don’t need to know. You’re no longer the grand arbiter of my personal life, thanks to the fact that my kid’s in my custody and not yours.” Jones huffs a breath, a tiny smile playing across her lips. Clint suspects that this isn’t the first time she’s hidden her amusement from Tony Stark. “That said, I’m going to go work on other important lawyer work while you two have your girl-talk.”

“Pepper’s told us about your manicures,” Clint replies casually. Across the desk, Jones nearly snorts coffee. Tony levels them both a murderous glance, and Clint shrugs. “As long as we’re on the topic of girl talks.”

“I hate every one of you,” Tony declares, and he swirls out of the office like Laufeyson, only shutting the door as an afterthought.

Jones very subtly wipes her mouth along the side of her index finger, and Clint cracks a grin. “You sure you meant to give him a kid?” he asks.

“Unfortunately, he and Bruce came as an inescapable two-for-one deal,” she returns, and he laughs for a few seconds. Jones smiles at him over the lip of her mug, but he can see the amusement drain from her face as she sips. He considers bringing Kate Bishop back into the conversation, narrowing their focus back to what’s important, but he knows from the way her lips roll together once she’s done drinking that no refocusing is necessary.

He watches as Jones leans forward to set her coffee down on the corner of his desk. “Like I was saying,” she says finally, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear, “the thing about Kate is that she expects everyone in her life to behave like the versions she’s created in her head.”

“Like cartoon superheroes or something?”

She shakes her head. “That’s the thing: they’re not idealized versions. They’re— Okay, here. What’s one of your faults?”

“Uh,” he says dumbly. He knows he’s frowning by the way she tilts her head at him. “Couldn’t we pick a different guinea pig? Like, Stark or something?”

Jones smirks a little and leans back in her chair. “If you don’t want to tell me what the person you sleep with complains about, fine,” she responds. When Clint opens his mouth to protest, she waves it away with a flick of her wrist. “Tony’s an egotist,” she fills in. “It’s a character flaw, but it doesn’t make him a bad person. And if Kate knew him and figured that out about him, she could make that work with her worldview. But if she also knew he was a closet romantic with a mile-wide sentimental streak and he didn’t live up to that . . . ”

She trails off with a shrug, and Clint nods. “That’s where the problems start?”

“Exactly. Her sense of right and wrong isn’t inflated, necessarily, but it’s very specific. And it’s hard for her to wrap her head around a world where those expectations don’t match reality.”

“And that’s why she went after her classmates like a rabid wolverine?” he asks, but Jones simply raises a finger and shakes her head. He sighs and glances down at his legal pad—mostly useless chicken-scratch, nothing he won’t remember on his own. But he still picks up his pen and scribbles in _private worldview where people need to live up to her expectations—classmates fucked that up?_ anyway. When he finishes writing, Jones is watching him. “This moral code of hers isn’t something that needs fixing, is it?”

She snorts lightly, a bitter sound that’s not quite a laugh, and shakes her head a second time. “No more than any other teenager needs his weird mental tics fixed,” she replies, and Clint lets himself crack a tiny smile. She runs her fingers through her hair. “What Kate needs is another year in my therapy group and support from the people around her, not time in juvenile detention or in a shelter,” she says after a few more seconds. Her eyes bore into Clint’s as she peers across the desk, and he finds himself setting down his pen to just _listen_. “I know that you barely know me and have no reason to trust me—”

“Aside from the fact that you know how to rub Stark the wrong way,” he jokes, and she flashes him a half-second grin.

“—but the only thing that ten convictions will do to Kate Bishop is break her further. It’s the last thing she needs.”

Clint presses his lips together and nods slightly, his attention dropping to his notepad. He thinks back to his stupid teenage mistakes, all the voids he tried to fill with the wrong-sized pegs. He spent a lot of his suspension during the fall thinking about how Barney’s dumbass plea deal’d helped save him from the kinda life Jones is talking about now, one where his stupid mistakes broke him instead of helped him. 

He wonders if he would’ve done better with a therapist to help him out instead of a pot-smoking felon of a brother and a group of assholes who tried to convince him they counted as friends.

Kate Bishop’s lucky to have somebody like Jessica Jones on her side instead of somebody more like Clint himself.

“They’re pretty serious charges,” he says after a couple long, silent seconds, his own handwriting unfamiliar and unfocused. Jones nods, her hands around her coffee mug. Clint can’t remember her picking it back up. “This isn’t a girl who stole her dad’s car for a joyride and now needs a ‘hard love’ kinda lesson. She beat the shit outta some other kids at a party and, far as I can tell, didn’t look back.”

“She looked back,” Jones replies quietly. Her voice catches, transforming into something almost distant, and she glances down at the mug in her hands. “Kate’s not hardened, Mister Barton, she’s _hurt_. She’s—” She tucks the same loose strand of hair from earlier behind her ear and meets Clint’s eyes again. “Everyone discovers that the world’s an ugly place around that age. She’s discovered it tenfold.”

He nods, just the once, and then allows the corner of his mouth to tip into a tiny smile. “I ask anything here and I run into the trump card, don’t I?”

“Like a brick wall,” she replies. The lightness in her voice never reaches her eyes.

Clint walks her to Bruce’s office after their meeting, the two of them launching into a discussion about a new child welfare article they both read before Clint even slips out the door and into the hallway. The normal hustle and bustle of the office chases him around as he wanders back into his office, picks up the empty coffee mugs, and carries them into the break room. He tries to push Kate Bishop out of his mind and fall into the rhythm of washing and drying, but she keeps creeping back into his thoughts. He thinks about her sitting on the wrong side of Tanner Sullivan’s big desk at Cramer and March as he reduces her fate to billable hours; then, he imagines her in a cell in the juvenile detention center, sleeping on a thin mattress and listening to the rattle of the guards’ keys, and he slams one of the mugs into the dish drainer too hard.

“Stark breaks enough of those for the entire office,” a voice points out, and Clint nearly jerks out of his own skin as he twists to glance over his shoulder. Peggy stops rifling through the cabinet for a teabag and frowns at him. “The mugs,” she clarifies, nodding at the dish drainer. “I think he breaks three or four of them a year. It’s why some of them date back to the beginning of time: we had to pull them down out of storage.”

He forces a polite little grin. “I figured Fury just liked drinking out of something with his face on it.”

She laughs. “He’s called those campaign mugs the worst choice he’s ever made,” she informs him, and then grins in victory when she finally finds the box of tea she wants.

He sets the second mug in the drainer alongside the first, leaving the break room in her capable hands, and wanders back toward his office. Behind her cubicle’s half-walls, Darcy’s desk looks a little like a fortress, with piles of files serving as buttresses to hold off the invading army. She cradles the phone against her shoulder and scribbles a message with one hand while the other props up one of the leaning folder towers, and Clint’s momentarily impressed with her prowess.

He’s less impressed, however, when she slams down the phone and says, “Go put this on Bucky’s desk and I might have time for you in, like, two hours.”

Before he can ask, the pink message slip is dangling in front of his nose. He frowns at her, but all she does is wave it in front of him like a matador tempting a bull with a red flag; when he lifts it out from between her fingers, she immediately returns to entering a bunch of new cases into the computer.

“Darcy—”

“Two hours,” she repeats without looking up. Her fingers fly on the keyboard, green-tipped blurs as she starts entering information into a new window. 

He sighs. “Darcy—”

“Oh my god, Clint, I know I am your intern but I am _also_ insanely busy right now!” Her head snaps up, her curls bouncing all over, and she shoots him the world’s most wicked glare. He holds up both his hands, complete with the message slip, and the glare only intensifies. “Jane comes back at the end of the week, Natasha’s starting a file audit on Wednesday that I at least need to start setting up for Jane, Steve just dumped a whole bunch of charges on my desk, and Bucky’s about to come back from docket with, like, a list of tasks a mile long.” She shoves her hair out of her face, bracelets jangling. “Unless there is a literal fire you need me to put out, I don’t have time for _anything_ until—”

“It’s a side project,” he interrupts, and Darcy’s mouth immediately snaps shut. For a couple seconds, they stare at each other, her large eyes caught in surprise. Clint swears he can see the wheels in her head start turning, and rightfully so; the last time he asked her for help on a side project, it required she ignore Barney and hoard his secrets.

She purses her full lips. “Time-sensitive?”

He finally drops his hands. “End of the week or start of the next is fine.”

“And how many people do I have to lie to this time?”

“None,” he answers. Something like disappointment flashes across her features, and Clint rolls his eyes. “You hated keeping my secrets.”

“Except for the fact that I knew how messed up you were before _anyone_ ,” she retorts. He suspects that there’s something like embarrassment creeping up his throat, but they both ignore it. He watches Darcy dig through the mess on her desk for a pen. “Lay it on me, boss man.”

“Don’t call me boss man,” he instructs, and he nudges over to knock a fist into her shoulder when she starts to write it down. She graces him with a crooked grin, and suddenly, Clint wonders whether his little side project is even a good idea.

Of course, little late now.

“I want you to look up Kate Bishop’s victims in our system and tell me if they’ve got any priors,” he instructions, and he’s grateful when she starts writing without a second glance. He leans his elbows on the top of her little half-wall. “There’s five of them. I want any connection they have to her, any suits that might’ve involved her or her family, anything you can find that’ll give me half a hint about what’s going on.”

Darcy nods her way through his explanation, punctuating her notes with a dramatic loop at the end of the words _anything else_. When she looks up at him, they engage in a brief staring contest, her eyebrows climbing slowly into her hairline like she’s waiting for the end of a joke. Finally, she asks, “I know I’m not the expert, but isn’t our job to worry about how to convict her, not to poke around in her victim’s dirty laundry?”

“You can’t convict someone without knowing every angle of their case,” he replies with a little shrug. She tilts her head at him, squinting slightly, and he worries about how unconvincing he sounds. He gestures with his hands like he’s playing with a Rubik’s cube. “Last thing you want is to watch the defense twist your case around until they’re showing off all its flaws. I wanna be prepared.”

“For the douchebag attorney to suddenly find all your weaknesses?” she asks suspiciously.

“For any surprise,” he responds. She narrows her eyes at him, so he pushes off her cubicle wall and backs away. “You’re busy, remember? Can’t possibly talk to me or do any of my work? World coming to an end?”

“I’m making notes about your sarcasm for when your boyfriend asks if I have any concerns about the internship program!” she announces. 

“Like I won’t be able to make him forget,” Clint retorts, and he listens to her sputter on his way to drop off Bucky’s message. 

 

==

 

“I thought you were working,” Clint sighs down the phone as he accepts a plate from the woman behind the sneeze guard. He mouths _thanks_ at her, but she just rolls her eyes and starts slopping questionable-looking chicken parmesan onto a fresh plate. He helps himself to a couple breadsticks. “‘Cause last I checked, money doesn’t materialize outta thin air, and—”

“Whatever happened to helpin’ your down-on-his-luck brother, huh?” Barney demands on the other end of the phone. Clint props the phone between his shoulder and ear as he carries his tray over to the display of premade sandwiches. Phil’s in trial all day; least he can do is bring the guy some lunch. “The whole job thing didn’t work out—”

“Funny how that always happens,” Clint mutters.

“—and it’s not like you don’t have cash to burn. You’re not even paying rent anymore.”

“You make it sound like we don’t have any bills to pay,” Clint retorts. He inspects what he thinks might be tuna on wheat, then moves on to squint at gray-looking ham and greenish-tinged beef. He wonders briefly whether the county health department ever visits the judicial complex cafeteria. Barney, on the other hand, huffs a disgusted noise down the phone. “Living with somebody doesn’t mean you’re off the hook.”

“Yeah, but I’m sayin’ if Mister Right already could pay for everything without you, you’ve gotta have a hundred bucks to toss my way.” Clint clenches his jaw as he tosses a turkey sandwich for Phil onto his tray and follows it up with a bag of chips. “C’mon, Li’l B,” Barney presses when stays quiet for too long. “Ally’s got needs, y’know?”

“That’s sufficiently vague.”

Barney snorts a laugh. “You’re such a fuckin’ punk,” he declares, and Clint hears the tell-tale click of a lighter on the other end of the phone.

He tries not to sigh. It’s eleven-thirty on a Wednesday morning, too damn early for the usual lunch rush in the judicial complex’s basement cafeteria but early enough that he’s still the jerk with his cell phone plastered to his ear. He’d answered in the elevator without glancing at the caller ID, a mistake that he’s paying for now that Barney’s harassing him for money. They mostly talk about sports these days—Barney tries to ask after the folks from the park who end up arrested, even knowing that Clint can’t answer any of his rants—but money comes in a close second. He’s encouraged Barney into a half-dozen different jobs since the start of the year, but most of the time, it ends just like this:

Clint listening to Barney smoke (maybe a cigarette, maybe not) and complain about how his newest job ended in chaos. Every time, it ends in how he and his not-quite girlfriend have “needs” and “bills to pay.”

He rubs his temple as he snags a couple cans of soda from the standing fridge. “Come over for dinner Saturday,” he finally says, “and we can—” 

“Yeah, _sure_ ,” Barney scoffs. Clint can practically hear him roll his eyes. “Me, you, and your suit of a boyfriend, drinkin’ beers and—”

“I can’t make decisions about cash without at least telling Phil what’s up,” Clint interrupts. He leaves his tray on the edge of the counter before the temptation to throw it at something wins out. “If you come, you can explain it yourself and—”

“God, did he cut off your balls when you moved in? ‘Cause it sounds to me like your relationship’s turned you into one big pu—”

“You come for dinner, or you find your hundred bucks elsewhere,” Clint snaps, and he misses out on the last of whatever Barney’s saying ‘cause he pulls the phone away from his ear and hangs up on him.

His cell starts buzzing in his pocket before the cashier’s done ringing up his lunch and _again_ before he finds himself a table to scarf down his own meal, but he ignores it. In the last couple months, he and Barney have perfected the dance of arguing over the phone before making up over a take-and-bake pizza and some beers, and Clint knows it’ll be the same way again. Ally’ll complain about needing cash ‘til Barney shows up for dinner, Barney’ll charm Phil with his easy, half-deceptive smile, and they’ll watch baseball or something like one big happy family. They’ve done it twice before; no reason to change it up now.

He’s halfway through his rubbery breaded chicken when his phone starts buzzing again. He abandons his fork to check the caller ID, and he’s still fiddling with his phone when a voice asks, “Clinton Barton?”

Clint jerks his head up a little too hard and finds himself staring up at a man he’s never seen before. The guy’s probably in his middle fifties, though he’s clearly trying to hide it; he keeps what’s left of his hair cut short like the bald patch is actually a style, and his dark suit’s tailored to hide all of his paunchiest bits. His cufflinks flash as he opens his jacket and slides into the empty seat across from Clint, and Clint swallows his mouthful of cafeteria Italian food. Most the tables are empty—there’s a gaggle of clerks in one corner, then a couple defense attorneys in another—and Clint’s suddenly aware of how conspicuous the whole thing is: assistant district attorney with two lunches on his plate, joined by a slicked-back middle-aged stranger in a nice suit.

He tucks his phone back in his pocket. “You must already know the answer to that if you’re sitting down,” he comments.

The stranger flashes him a smile. His teeth are white and even under his slightly-curled lip. “I didn’t want to startle you.”

“It’s a little late for that.”

The guy chuckles, a dark sound in the back of his throat, and raises a hand. His wedding band’s probably more expensive than Stark’s. “Please, Mister Barton, you can lower your hackles. I’m only here to talk about my daughter.”

Clint feels his grip on his fork tighten. He forces himself to set it down on his tray and then reaches for his soda. He knows he’s being watched, so he stretches out every motion like taffy. He’s a captive audience—no way to beat feet away without turning it into a bit of a scene, especially since the lunch rush is starting to trickle in—and, worse, there’s nobody else from the office around.

He hopes his hunch is wrong. He sets down his drink before he says, “I don’t think I know your daughter.”

“Oh, I think you do,” the stranger says. He smiles again, and his eyes flash like a shark’s. “Her name is Kate Bishop.”

Clint mentally curses his luck in every language he can think of, pig Latin included.

Derek Bishop holds onto his tight, curl-lipped smile for a few seconds longer before he folds his hands on the rickety Formica table and leans in a few degrees closer. Clint finds himself wishing he’d joined Stark and everybody at the shitty taco cart down the street instead of opting for slimy pasta and rubbery chicken. A voice that sounds a lot like Phil’s screams in the back of his head that he can’t talk to an unrepresented defendant, but Bishop’s not the one facing charges, here. Worse, Clint’s pretty sure the guy’s never learned to take _no_ for an answer.

He forces a smile, his fingers still wrapped around the Pepsi can. “I’m not sure I can talk to you,” he replies politely.

“And I’m not sure you _can’t_ ,” Bishop returns. His tone bobs and weaves with a sorta practiced lightness, and it reminds Clint of how Stark sounds whenever he’s on the local morning show. “I’m only here as an interested party. I’m concerned about my Kate.”

“Then you should talk to her lawyer.”

Bishop’s smile twitches, but never quite fades away. “There are difficulties surrounding that relationship right now,” he replies. His shoulders lift in something like a tight shrug. “On the other hand, I’ve heard that Assistant District Attorney Barton is easy to work with. A good sport, to say the least.”

Clint picks up his soda. “You’ve heard that,” he echoes.

“As I understand it, you helped keep Kate’s first hearing from disintegrating into a disaster. You were on the prosecution team that put Zebediah Killgrave behind bars where he belongs.”

“Because the evidence proved him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” Clint points out.

“Of course,” Bishop replies, but he nods in a way that reminds Clint of a playful shoulder nudge. Clint forces a smile and sips his soda. “Mister Barton, I know how this situation must look to you,” he continues after a few seconds, and Clint swallows without really tasting the cola. “A rich girl starts a fight at a party, disagrees with her attorney, and generally makes life difficult. But Kate is troubled, and I assure you, we’re working on a solution to those troubles. A court battle isn’t the answer.”

Clint knows that his forced smile’s settled into something darker from the way Bishop’s lips settle into a tight line. He sets down his soda can and watches the other man’s fingers flex around one another. He can’t imagine a scenario where Derek Bishop’d win a fistfight, but he can imagine that those meaty knuckles and the expensive diamond wedding band’d hurt if he managed the first swing. 

Not that the president of a multimillion-dollar publishing company’d punch an attorney in a cafeteria full of witnesses, but Clint’d rather not tempt him.

“I know what you’re asking,” he says after a couple more seconds, and Bishop raises his eyebrows like he’s actually surprised. “I know you won’t outright ask it, ‘cause you’re too smart for that, and I know you’ll deny you even stopped down here to talk to me if I mention it to Fury. And, because Fury and everybody wants to play nice with you, they’ll pretend you’re not lying through your teeth.” The corner of Bishop’s mouth kicks up into a humorless smirk. Clint forces a little smile. “But I’m the low man on the totem pole, Mister Bishop. So even if I was tempted to give you what you want—and I’m not—I don’t really wanna be the guy in the hot seat for dismissing ten charges arising out of a _Fight Club_ -style basement brawl.”

Bishop raises his hands. “I never suggested that you dismiss—”

“Yeah, I know,” Clint interrupts, and he watches the guy’s palms settle back down onto the table. “But I’m telling you, whether you suggest it or not: it’s not gonna happen.”

Across the table, Bishop stares him down, his dark eyes even and unbearably cool. Clint forces a little smile and picks up his soda again. For a minute, he’s reminded of all the bullshit posturing the Tracy brothers used to subject him to back in school: staring contests, arm-wrestling matches, challenges to beat the snot outta other kids ‘cause it was that or letting the brothers beat _him_ up. Back then, Clint’d just assumed that people grew out of those kinds of juvenile pissing contests.

Instead, he discovered the thousand other forms those kinds of contests take.

Eventually, though, Bishop flashes another white-toothed smile and pushes up out of his chair. “It was a pleasure talking to you, Mister Barton,” he says smoothly. “You take care, and I look forward to seeing you at Kate’s next court date.”

Clint nods. “I’ll see you then,” he replies, and then sips his soda like the whole conversation never happened. The guy nods back, just this one tight jerk of his chin, before he twists on his heel and stalks out of the cafeteria. Clint waits until he’s all the way out the double doors before he finally exhales, and if his breath escapes as a muttered _fuck_ , too damn bad.

He fishes out his phone to find that, in addition to Barney’s couple missed calls, Stark’s texted him pictures of greasy food cart tacos. _you’re missing out_ , the caption reads, and Clint rolls his eyes.

_for once, you might be right_ , he texts back, and then he leaves his cold lunch on the cafeteria table to go take Phil his sandwich and drink.

 

==

 

“If you’re telling me this because you expect an ethics lecture, I’m going to disappoint you,” Phil says as he bends over in the front yard. They’re supposed to be stretching after their run, but Clint finds himself momentarily distracted by the way Phil’s sweatpants cling to his ass. When he shifts into a lunge, he glances over his shoulder and grins. “I’m not rubbing your sore calves tonight,” he warns.

“I’m more interested in you rubbing other things,” Clint replies, and Phil laughs at him, his voice echoing across their front yard.

It’s a warm, half-overcast May evening in their little neighborhood, the kind of night where the threat of rain’s not quite enough to keep people with dogs or strollers inside their houses. Phil’d arrived home a half-hour after Clint, tightly wound after the first day of trial against Heimdall, and he’d greeted Clint first with a kiss and then with instructions to find their running shoes and water bottles. Their usual after-work recap stretched out over three or four miles, circling the neighborhood and local park with them as they ran.

Clint’d saved his run-in with Derek Bishop for after all of Phil’s trial-related frustrations, and now, he sits down on the grass to stretch out his legs while he watches Phil finish off his water. “I know he’s not the defendant,” he says, and Phil’s eyebrows rise. “If anything, he’s an extra safeguard for the kid. It should feel more like talking to that asshole Sullivan than talking to Kate herself.”

Phil ducks to wipe his temple on the sleeve of his t-shirt. “But?”

“But I don’t like it,” Clint responds, and Phil chuckles as he shifts to stretch out the other leg. Clint sends the guy a warning look. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“I sleep with you at night. I know your ‘nothing’ face, and that’s _not_ it.” When Phil grins at him, all his laugh lines crinkling, Clint kicks at the side of his foot. Phil hops away, his face full to brimming with mirth, and drops down onto the grass with him. The setting sun breaks through the clouds to cast long yellow-gold fingers of light through the leaves, and it makes Phil’s skin look tan and sun-kissed.

Clint wonders how long they need to live together before making out in the front yard becomes socially acceptable. 

Phil stays quiet for a couple seconds, propped up on one hand and drinking his water, and Clint cocks his head at him. He watches his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows, then traces the slope of his shoulders as he settles back on his hands. 

“I’m just wondering whether you don’t like talking to Bishop because it’s too much like talking to Sullivan,” he finally says. Clint feels himself frown, and Phil shrugs. “Parents aren’t supposed to approach juvenile offender cases like businessmen or attorneys. They’re supposed to approach them like, well, parents.”

“You know I technically don’t know what that’s supposed to look like, right?” Clint retorts.

Phil rolls his eyes a little, and Clint retaliates by reaching over and helping himself to the last of Phil’s water. Phil nudges the bottom of his foot with his sneaker, probably some half-hearted punishment for his thievery, but then he settles his shoe there. “I can’t imagine your cousin was thrilled when you and Barney got arrested.” 

“Like I even remember,” Clint snorts, but of course that’s a lie. He drops back onto his elbows and stares up at the thick canopy of maple leaves over their heads. Trick’s round face, swollen red from a lot of booze and a lot more anger, flashes in front of him, and for a couple seconds, he’s a terrified teenager trying not to piss his pants while Trick screamed at him in the interview room. He can still remember his own eyes staring back at him from the two-sided mirror. He’d wanted to beg the detectives to come back in, anything to stop Trick from yelling, but he’d figured the screaming was better than having his ass beat somewhere down the line.

He’s aware that Phil’s watching him, the toe of his running shoe still pressed tight against the bottom of Clint’s own foot, so he shrugs. “I mean, I think he yelled for a while,” he amends.

Phil smiles softly, a little lift to the corners of his mouth that proves he smells the half-truth, but he lets it slip out of their reach. “Parents aren’t meant to wheel and deal with the attorneys at all, never mind in a conveniently-empty cafeteria with no one to overhear.” Clint stops drinking, but his fingers pick at the lip of the water bottle lid. “Ethically, you’re in the clear,” Phil continues, nudging his foot again. “Bishop’s too smart to try and turn this into some sort of power play. He probably knows what happened last fall, and that our office stood by you every step of the way. He’d be an idiot to try and turn this into something it’s not.”

His voice tapers off at the end as he sits up to twist at the waist, but Clint knows him too well to let some distracting stretching end the conversation. Even if Phil’s black t-shirt hugs his chest and shoulders in a way that tempts him to strip the guy naked on the front lawn. “But?” he prompts.

Phil stops stretching to look at him. For a couple seconds, they just stare at each other across the grass. The sun ducks back behind the clouds, leaving them in an eerie yellow twilight, and he watches Phil roll his lips together. “But strategically, I have no idea what this means for your case.”

“That’s reassuring,” Clint deadpans, complete with the appropriate eye roll. Phil grins at him and offers him a hand up, and they wander back into the house knocking shoulders. Sandy greets them at the door like a dog, weaving around their ankles; when Clint heads for the kitchen to check and see if they’ve got anything edible in the fridge, she trots after him.

“Your cat’s broken!” he calls out to Phil, the comment punctuated by greedy meowing. He drags out all the relatively-recent leftovers—some stir-fry, a single hamburger, the remnants of the Indian food Clint’d picked up on his way home from muy thai Monday night—and leaves the containers on the counter. He feeds Sandy and starts nuking the stir-fry before he realizes that Phil’s nowhere to be seen.

He leaves the microwave running and wanders down the hallway, convinced he’ll hear the shower running or some TV newscaster rambling about tomorrow’s weather, but the house is weirdly quiet. When he finally hunts the other guy down, he’s standing in the middle of their bedroom, his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose as he squints down at his cell phone. His thumbs tap the screen, and the rhythmic sound of the keyboard drowns out Clint’s footsteps just enough that he flinches when hands catch his hips.

“I’m starting to think that whole theory about cell phones isolating people’s kind of right,” he comments, and Phil snorts as he finishes typing. He smells like wind and a little like sweat, and Clint rests his chin against his shoulder for a second while the sent-text sound plays. Phil stays still for a couple seconds too long, though, and Clint feels himself frown as he steps away. “Something wrong?”

“I don’t think so, no,” Phil answers, but there’s something tense in the back of his voice. He locks his phone and tosses it on the bed. Clint watches appreciatively as he loses the glasses and then his sticky t-shirt, but he can tell by the way Phil keeps glancing at his phone that he’s distracted. “Ken called,” he says after a couple seconds.

“As in Ken Blake from Colorado?” Clint asks, and Phil nods as he heads for the dresser. The drawers are still a mess from Clint moving in, all their t-shirts tossed together, and he grins a little as Phil pulls out one of the shitty free t-shirts he’d received back in college. It’s soft and worn, and it hugs Phil in all the right places. “Didn’t he just call the other day?”

Phil smiles a little as he shrugs into the t-shirt. “He just wants to pick my brain.”

“You’d think the guy’d have federal underlings he can bother.”

“Sure, but none of them made the national news last fall for convicting a businessman turned murderer.” Clint snorts at him, halfway to rolling his eyes, and he watches as Phil crosses his arms over his chest. It tightens the shirt across his shoulders, and Clint momentarily forgets about Blake _and_ about dinner. “He’ll cool off once the local district attorney’s office stops trying to stick their noses in the federal case, and then I won’t hear from him until the next disaster.”

Clint bites down on a tiny smile. “If he’s that kinda friend, no wonder Maria’s a fan.”

Phil rolls his eyes, but humor creeps across his face and finds the corners of his mouth. “I’m still not sure Maria likes _me_ , you know,” he retorts, and Clint laughs. He considers asking where he falls on the totem pole of Maria’s tolerance, but then Phil’s stepping into his personal space. His hands reach out and flatten against Clint’s hips, a long, lingering touch that’s coupled a searching look.

Clint’s not sure where the tightness in the back of his throat comes from, but he swallows around it. “What?” he asks. He’s suddenly afraid to break eye contact.

The smile Phil shares with him is this small, intensely personal thing that blooms in Clint’s belly and warms him from the inside out. He’s so wrapped up in Phil, so stupidly lost, that he actually forgets how to breathe for a second. 

“Nothing,” Phil answers, and the word’s so full of promise that Clint can’t come up with a better reply than to kiss him ‘til the timer in the kitchen goes off. 

 

==

 

“Until she cries or gets hungry, she’s mine,” Darcy declares, and actually angles Astrid Odinson away from Phil and Bruce.

The whole group of attorneys and their trial assistants are gathered in the conference room to “celebrate” Astrid’s first successful day at daycare even if Clint suspects that the whole thing’s an excuse to show the baby off to everybody. Astrid’s bright-eyed and smiling, flashing her gums to anyone who looks. Her attention drifts from stranger to stranger while Darcy carries her around like she’s displaying a new princess to her waiting court.

“You know she’s just gonna stuff that baby in her bag someday, right?” Clint asks Thor. The proud dad stands with his shoulder against the wall and his arms crossed, watching the show.

“She will bring her back as soon as she needs to change a diaper,” Thor responds with a grin, and they both watch as Darcy lets Steve tickle Astrid’s chubby baby belly exactly _once_.

It’s finally Friday, a day that Clint spent the whole week dreading but somehow, miraculously, survived. Even after a morning of sentencing hearings, a quick lunch in Steve’s office with Bucky, Tony, and Bruce, and his afternoon nightmare docket (down to thirty-nine defendants this week, and only two run-ins with a scarily-angry Sif Rowan), he feels almost like a whole person. He’s not worn down and exhausted, and he’s only day-dreamed about his bed in the context of stripping off Phil’s pinstriped pants and crawling along the length of his body. He leans against the wall next to Thor and tries not to notice exactly how well those same pants hug Phil’s thighs as he rolls his eyes at Stark’s latest baby-related rant.

Something sharp impacts Clint’s side, and he huffs out a pained breath before he shoots Natasha a dirty look. “Hey! You trying to bruise me?”

“I’d hate to deny Phil the honors,” she retorts, the corner of her mouth kicking up into a smile. He elbows her back and then wriggles out of the way before she retaliates. If Thor minds their near-collision, he keeps his mouth shut. “You’re drooling, by the way.”

“And I didn’t miss the way you craned your neck when Pepper walked by in those shoes, earlier,” he returns. She raises a perfect red eyebrow, he tries to mimic the look, and he swears the only thing that keeps her from laughing is her years of practiced disinterest. Even her eye-roll is warm. “You survive your bench trial?”

She snorts at him. “When he said, ‘Look, I don’t know _how_ she fell down the stairs, she just did,’ I thought Judge Brassels was going to stop the proceeding to find him guilty right there.” Clint laughs, and she shakes her head. “When I left, Heimdall was explaining how ‘innocent until proven guilty’ doesn’t mean the judge has to believe every word out of your mouth.”

“Still beats the speeding defendant who admitted he was speeding but wanted to ‘fight the man’ by showing up to trial.” Finally, Natasha grins at him, and he shrugs. “Between the two of us, we’ve got all the crazies.”

“Until they appeal and go to Stark,” she replies. Astrid fusses all of a sudden, and they both glance over as Tony steps back, crosses himself, and shoves Pepper in front of him. Pepper rolls her eyes and offers to take the baby, which leads to Stark hiding behind Bruce instead—not that Bruce seems surprised. Clint thinks about commenting on the whole thing—pretty strawberry-blonde Pepper with a chubby golden-haired baby—when Natasha says, “Judge Smithe’s got her Monday docket posted already.”

The words die on the back of Clint’s tongue. “Yeah?”

She turns her head until she meets his eyes. “Bishop’s status conference is set for the middle of the morning.” He considers shrugging, but something about her expression stops him. It’s not tight so much as it’s thoughtful, like she’s trying to read the lines on his face like tea leaves. The more her gaze sweeps over him, the more he feels like he needs a hand of cards in front of him and a pile of poker chips.

When she presses her lips into a tight line, he asks, “And?”

“And that lawyer you complained about isn’t listed.” Her shoulders jump in something like a shrug, but it’s marred by careful calculation. Natasha’s always felt like one of the people he can trust, somebody he can let into his head to play around while he’s struggling for an answer, but there’s a distance between them, too. A year later, and she’s still enigmatic and unapproachable, impossible to read. He wonders, sometimes, whether he and Bruce really know her as well as they think.

He wonders if _anybody_ knows her that well. 

“It just lists the firm?” he asks. He tries to sound light and casual about it, but his mind betrays him as it trips back to the dark-haired girl on the stairs outside the judicial complex. Natasha tips her head to one side and narrows her eyes, and he stares right back at her. “Happens all the time when they’re switching up attorneys, you know that.”

“Just like _you_ know that his firm isn’t on the docket sheet, either,” she counters evenly. He rolls his eyes and glances back across the conference room. Darcy’s apparently abandoned her possessiveness, laughing with Jane as Astrid lets out a weird, happy cooing noise in Pepper’s arms. She’s still cooing when she lands in Peggy’s grip, but then Peggy passes her right along to Maria, who actually grins at the tiny bundle of cute. Clint wishes he knew how to use that “vine” program Darcy installed on his phone a couple weeks earlier, because he wants to record Maria’s baby-charming face and hold onto it as blackmail.

Astrid’s kicking her tiny sock-covered feet when Natasha finally presses, “What aren’t you telling me?”

He allows her one sideways glance. “Nothing unethical.”

“That wasn’t the question.” Maria hands the baby off to Phil, and Clint ends up glancing at the carpet. It’s not that he’s Stark, exactly—he’s got no personal vendetta against babies and he’s not insecure enough to think that a five-second hold’ll morph into baby fever—but their relationship still feels too fresh to laugh about baby cuddles. He scuffs his shoe against the crappy industrial-gray shag. “The girl comes in with a high-profile attorney from the firm that voted Stark off the island,” she continues as Clint studies his shoelaces, “and you hate him enough that you spend a half-hour complaining about him at the bar.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “It wasn’t a half hour,” he defends, but when he glances over at her, her quirked eyebrow shuts him up. He shakes his head and looks back at the floor.

“You meet with her therapist for a couple hours one morning. The next thing I know, either the juvenile clerks made a clerical error or her attorney’s off the case—and you don’t want to talk about it.” He shoves his hands in his pockets, but it fails to lift the weight of her gaze from his shoulders. “If something’s wrong and you need help on this case, all you need to do is—”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he interrupts quickly, his head jerking up, and he watches Natasha raise both her eyebrows. Across the room, Thor’s scooping up his daughter like Simba at the start of _The Lion King_ , and everyone’s laughing at him. For a half-second, Clint feels detached from the rest of the office, strangely separate from the group. He drags his fingers through his hair and sighs. “You ever land a case where nothing seems right?” he asks, glancing at her. “Start to finish, you smell something fishy you can’t put your finger on?”

She nods. “Instinct.”

“Yeah, but— I don’t know, it’s not the instinct where you look the defendant in the eye and think he’s innocent. ‘Cause I know she beat the shit outta those boys like I know my own pulse. It just—” The words end up garbled in the back of his head, and all he ends up releasing is a long stream of breath. Beside him, Natasha keeps watching; out of the corner of his eye, he can see her rolling her lips together, searching for the right response. He’s not sure it exists, so he shakes his head. “There’s something up with this kid.”

Natasha’s head bobs once, but her lips stay pressed in a tight line. He watches her draw in a steady breath before their eyes meet. “She’s a teenager who started a brawl at a party, Clint.”

“I know that, but—”

“She battered and assaulted five other kids,” she presses, and he glances away again. “At a party with booze and pot and god knows what else.” She sighs quietly. “Not all teenagers are good kids in a bad situation. Sometimes, what you see is what you get.”

“But I _met_ her,” he retorts, his voice sharp in his own ears. He pushes away from the wall, suddenly grateful that everyone has either trickled out of the room to return to work or is busily fawning over the baby. He thinks for a split-second he feels Phil’s eyes on him, but he ignores it rub a hand over his face. “I met Kate Bishop during the Killgrave trial,” he repeats, more calmly, “and the girl who appeared in court isn’t the same person. Between September and now, something changed.”

Natasha crosses her arms under her breasts, her face completely neutral. “Yeah, she started going to parties and getting into fights,” she suggests.

Clint shakes his head. “Not that. Or if it’s that, there’s something else under it, something—”

“Okay, if your sometimes-terrifying boyfriend can hold the baby, you can hold the baby,” someone interrupts, and Clint twists around just in time for Darcy to half-shove Astrid into his grip. He blinks and tries to pull back, but it’s too late; instinct overrules common sense, and Darcy releases the baby before he really realizes that he’s reached out to take her. She’s starting to nod off, her long lashes blinking at him, and she settles into his grip in record time.

Next to him, Natasha bites down on a grin. He, on the other hand, scowls at Darcy. “That’s playing dirty.”

“ _That_ ,” Stark announces his hands on his hips, “is adorable. And intellectually-problematic, since imagining you with fat little babies leads to a mental picture of either you or Coulson having sex—”

“I appreciate that you imagine other men having sex,” Bruce intones, and Clint almost hurts himself holding in a bark of laughter.

“—but, you know, adorable.”

Clint only realizes how close Phil’s standing when he hears the other man release a tiny huff of laughter. By the time he glances over, Phil’s at his shoulder, their arms pressing together as he hovers over the bundle of baby in Clint’s grip. Clint’d almost suspect that Phil worried about him dropping her if there wasn’t so much warmth in Phil’s face. 

“If Tony says it, it must be true,” he comments, and offers Clint a soft, genuine smile.

“I bet you say that to all the guys who hold babies,” Clint retorts.

Tony only stops with the gagging sounds when Bruce bodily drags him out of the room.

 

==

 

“Hey, by the way,” Darcy says, and Clint glances up from where he’s packing his bag for the weekend.

The office is quiet, lulled into an easy calm now that the baby’s gone, and it’s clear from glancing at her that Darcy’s ready to head home. She’s wearing Converse with her suit slacks and an enormous snowflake-patterned cardigan over her blouse despite the late-spring sun outside. Her curls bob in a high ponytail as she leans her shoulder against his doorjamb. Clint knows he’ll always remember his first encounter with Darcy, but he prefers this version: relaxed, warm, and open. He misses her when she slips on her heels to walk into court—or, alternately, to exchange snide barbs with the other interns.

“Uh, earth to Clinton?” she cuts into his thoughts; he knows he frowns by the way her face lights up in a grin. He considers throwing a balled-up post-it note at her, but he thinks maybe that’d be unprofessional. “What, imagining all the disgusting things you’re going to do to your boyfriend later?”

He rolls his eyes. “Maybe I’m thinking about mowing the lawn,” he shoots back as he reaches for another file.

“I’m going to really hope you’ve never looked that up on Urban Dictionary,” she replies. When he glances back toward her, she’s crinkling her face up in something he assumes is disgust, and it’s ridiculous enough that he laughs. She responds by sticking out her tongue, and he shakes his head at her as he zips his bag shut. “Anyway, before this gets nasty—” 

“Gets?” 

“—I wanted to tell you that I ran backgrounds on all of Kate Bishop’s victims.” Clint’s fingers fumble with the zipper, and he abandons the task to look up at her. She shrugs, her one shoulder pinned against the doorjamb. “Aside from having really horrible names, they’re all clean. I think Evan or Devan got in trouble for drinking once before, but that’s literally all I could find.” She nods her head back toward her cubicle. “I printed out their bios and records, anyway. They’re in a folder labeled _office supply invoices_ if you want them.”

He snorts a laugh. “Invoices?” he repeats.

“Hey, you wanted it to be secret, and _nobody_ wants to poke their nose into a folder full of bills.” She flashes him a brilliant grin, and he can’t help but chuckle aloud. She flips her ponytail over her shoulder in what he assumes is victory and pushes herself away from the doorway. “I’ll see you on Monday, boss man.”

“Don’t call me that,” he instructs, and she cackles as she ducks out of the room. He rolls his eyes before he grabs his bag to sling it over his shoulder. Work starts to filter out of his head, and by the time he’s finally shut down his computer and grabbed his cell phone, he’s thinking about mundane tasks: mowing the lawn, grabbing groceries, his promise to do a phone interview with one of the nephews who’s writing about lawyers for career day. (He’s not sure why he won out over beloved Uncle Phil, but he’s sure as hell not complaining.)

He switches off the light and shuts the door, ready to head down and collect Phil, when he spots a manila folder sitting on Darcy’s keyboard. He considers ignoring it and carrying on with his life—heading down the hall, grabbing his guy by the belt loops and dragging him home to celebrate the weekend by dirtying their sheets—but his mind ticks right back to his conversation with Natasha. ‘Cause she’s right about not all screwed up kids having hearts of gold, but he feels like he knows Kate Bishop’s heart.

Or maybe, he feels like he _should_ know Kate Bishop’s heart, and that it somehow slipped away from him one day when he stopped paying attention.

He presses his lips together and stares at Darcy’s keyboard for way, way too long.

And he heads home with the _office supply invoices_ folder in his bag.


	6. Cogs in the Doom Machine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, Clint worries too much about Kate Bishop and not enough about other things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In a diversion, the defendant enters into an agreement with a court or district attorney’s office to complete certain tasks and pay money in order to avoid prosecution. In return, the crime or crimes they committed do not appear on his or her criminal record. Diversions are frequently used either right before or right after charges are filed; assigned tasks can include completing community service hours, paying fees, providing restitution to victims, and educational or treatment programs. You can think of it a little bit as probation without being convicted, especially since the defendant can be prosecuted if he or she fails to complete the agreed-upon tasks.
> 
> Trigger warning for a very brief and non-graphic reference to molestation.
> 
> Also, I edited this chapter a lot after my betas read through it, so if you find errors, they are most likely my own. I will be doing this for the next few chapters, as I realized yesterday that I have become a slave to narration and really, really need to cool my narrative jets.
> 
> Thanks to Jen and saranoh, who did a very thorough job until I started line-editing this monster.

“We need to talk about the Bishop case,” Nick Fury says first thing Monday morning, and Clint pours coffee all over the break room counter.

He swears under his breath, immediately shoving the coffee pot back on the burner to reach for the nearest roll of paper towels; Fury meets him halfway, holding out a stack of paper napkins before Clint can even ask for them. He drops a couple on the floor to mop up the growing puddle at his feet before he starts on the pool atop the Formica. Neither thing really distracts him from the steady pressure of Fury’s attention on the back of his head and neck.

When he’s done, he tosses the pile of sodden napkins into the garbage and turns around. Fury stands in the doorway, his hands on his hips and his eyebrows raised. His expression is stony and humorless, and Clint feels his stomach clench.

“Everything okay, sir?” he asks. His voice sounds sticky, caught somewhere on the back of his tongue.

“In my office,” Fury replies curtly, and his blazer sweeps behind him as he stalks out of the room.

Clint gathers up his coffee and follows, the ceramic warming his palms as he follows through the empty early-morning hallways of the district attorney’s office. Phil starts docket promptly at nine on Mondays, meaning that Clint either shows up with him a little before eight or drives himself into the office. He usually chooses the second option—an extra hour of sleep’s nice, and Phil always leaves a full thermos of coffee for him if he’s out the door first—but he’d spent most of his Sunday night tossing and turning, unable to settle into sleep. 

Twice, Phil’d twisted around in the rumpled sheets and reached for Clint in the dark. His sleep-heavy eyes had searched Clint’s, steady and curious in the mostly-dark of their bedroom, but Clint’d only managed to shake his head. 

The third time, Phil’d spooned up behind him, his breath warm against the back of Clint’s neck. He’d spread fingers along Clint’s bare skin and tangled their legs together before murmuring, “I won’t ask.”

Clint’d snorted. Twisting around meant catching a momentary glimpse of Phil’s shoulder in the dark, the silhouette of the man who pressed lips to the back of his shoulder and settled there. He’d closed his eyes before he’d said, “I couldn’t explain it if I wanted to.”

“I know,” Phil’d replied softly, and only then had Clint drifted the rest of the way to sleep.

He’d suspected then—and still suspects now, nodding to the boy intern as they turn the last corner before Fury’s office—that Phil’d known the source of his restlessness even without asking. After all, Clint’d spent the better part of their Sunday afternoon shut up in the office, Sandy purring under the little coffee table they’d moved in there as he pawed through the piles of police reports from Kate Bishop’s house party brawl. He’d read and reread the first-hand accounts, trying to memorize every facet of the case. He’d scribbled out notes until his hand hurt, filling a half-dozen pages of a legal pad with his messy scrawl.

He’d hoped to find answers hidden in the police reports and affidavits, some explanation for why a sixteen-year-old girl had snapped to the point where she threatened to “smash in Evan’s face with a beer bottle” (a quote from Devan). Instead, he’d ended up what felt like thousands of questions, tiny mysteries highlighted by the holes and inconsistencies that peppered the boys’ stories.

“I’m sure they were shaken up,” Phil’d said over dinner, reaching across the table for the salad dressing. “You said yourself that they thought Ethan—”

“Evan, not Ethan.”

Phil’d cracked a tiny, self-satisfied smile that suggested he’d picked the wrong name on purpose. “They thought Evan had a concussion,” he’d continued, shrugging as he capped up the dressing. “The police’d swarmed in, drunk kids were running everywhere, at least two of them had bloody noses and split lips. You can’t imagine them to remember every detail of their trauma.”

“I can remember the color shirt the clerk was wearing the day we knocked over that store,” Clint’d countered.

Phil’s tiny smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. “We’re not all as observant as you, now are we?” he’d asked, and passed Clint the salad bowl.

Clint jerks out of his thoughts at the sound of a door shutting heavily, and he twists to watch Fury cross his office and head to his desk. He hangs his jacket over the back of his chair before sinking down into the leather; when Clint stands stock still in the space between the door and the two empty chairs reserved for visitors, his boss nods toward them. Something like fear starts to crawl up from Clint’s belly and into his throat. He tries to breathe comfortably around it, fails, and settles for a sip of his coffee.

It’s strong and almost too bitter. He mentally curses Maria’s love for nearly-undrinkable toxic waste. 

Across from him, Fury leans back and folds his hands over his stomach. “Word on the street is that Kate Bishop wrote a letter to the court firing her lawyer,” he says casually, and Clint swallows with an audible gulp. He sits back in the uncomfortable vinyl chair, his mug pressed between his palms. “Personally requested that Wilson step in and represent her until the end of the case. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“Why would I know anything about it?” he asks. He thinks for a second that his voice catches, so he follows up the question with a shrug. “Wade and I mostly talk about our personal lives, not the law.”

The corner of Fury’s mouth kicks up into a wry little grin. “I can’t imagine Wilson talking about the law even in the courtroom,” he replies. Clint snorts a laugh and sips his coffee, trying desperately to chase the bolus of uncertainty back down into his belly; by the time he’s swallowed, the tiny smile’s faded entirely from the other man’s face. They watch each other, his office as silent as a tomb despite the huge windows along the far wall. 

Finally, Fury sighs. “How likely are we to win this case?” he asks.

Clint pauses with his coffee mug halfway to his mouth. “Sir?”

“I’ve spent the last three days fielding calls from reporters who want to know more about the kid who turned the house party into the latest installment of _Mortal Kombat_ ,” he explains, sitting forward to rest his arms on his desk. “I’m trying to keep them off the scent for now, but it’s a matter of time before they put two and two together and realize that Derek Bishop’s pretty little daughter shares her initials with an open juvenile offender case. The last thing I need is another P.R. disaster like what we fielded during the Killgrave case.”

Clint thinks back to the endless stream of editorials that’d run from the time the cops arrested Killgrave until the end of the trial, stories that’d stepped very close to the line of _smear campaign_. He wonders for a second whether Bishop owned the _The Bugle_. When he realizes Fury’s still watching him, though, he nods. “Nobody wants to revisit that mess.”

Fury raises his eyebrows. “But?”

“But,” Clint echoes. He glances down at the murky depths of his coffee, his thumb smoothing over a chip in the crappy ceramic used for their official county mugs. Steam curls off the surface, and he shakes his head. “I’ve been over the police reports with a fine-toothed comb,” he admits, “and the stories are patchy at best. Add in the fact that she’s sympathetic as hell, and it’s far from a slam dunk.” 

He raises his coffee mug again while Fury nods. “And?”

“There’s no ‘and.’”

“I’ve known you for a year now, Barton,” Fury presses. Clint keeps his eyes focused on the surface of his coffee. “I know the way you think. There’s something else under there.”

“It’s nothing,” Clint returns. When he steals a glance across the desk, Fury quirks an eyebrow. He sighs. “It’s a hunch,” he admits with a tiny shake of his head. He feels almost like he’s clearing the cobwebs, but the problem is, they knit back together right away. “Nothing I can put my finger on, just something—under the surface.”

Fury’s lips flatten into a tight line, his folded hands tightening around one another. For a second, Clint wonders whether he’s said the wrong thing. Once, tipsy on red wine and thoroughly fucked-out on their bed, Phil’d recalled the first time Fury’d shouted at him loud enough to rattle the windowpanes. Clint can’t remember the details—something about a fish tank, maybe—but he remembers the way Phil’d laughed about it that night, the fine lines around his eyes crinkling until Clint’d swallowed his chuckles in kisses.

He steels himself for the treatment Phil’d talked about—incandescent anger burning up like a white dwarf star—but instead, Fury swivels his chair toward the window and stands. He walks to the window, his expression hazy in the reflection off the glass.

“Offer her a diversion,” he says.

Clint nearly chokes on air. “What?” he sputters. His voice sounds too loud to his own ears. “She’s charged with an aggravated felony and nine other person crimes. I can’t imagine a prosecutor in the state who wouldn’t piss themselves laughing at—”

“You said yourself that there’s holes in the kids’ stories,” Fury cuts him off. “We’ve got hospital personnel who can testify to the broken nose, sure, but for the rest of it? It’s a six-man game of he-said, she-said with the world’s most sympathetic victim.” He turns away from the window and rests his hands on his hips. “We’ll be the laughing stock of the state even if a jury finds her guilty.”

“Maybe,” Clint replies, shrugging slightly, “but I’m sure she knows that, too. We can figure out a plea deal, maybe drop the assaults but keep the batteries, and—”

“And what? Throw her in juvenile hall for six months, then shelter for the next six?” Fury shakes his head. The breath he releases stretches out like a slow, half-silent sigh. “If she’s on a diversion agreement, she’s basically on probation. It keeps her in therapy, it keeps her outta trouble, it forces her to make restitution to the boys she pounded into the pavement.”

“Keeps her record clean, too,” Clint points out.

“So what? She’s a smart girl. Second she’s old enough, she’ll march into court with a petition for expungement and her record’ll move from sealed to non-existent.” Clint picks at the chip in his mug, nodding absently. This time, Fury definitely sighs. “You want her in juvenile hall?”

“No,” he admits.

“You think the problem’s at home? Think Daddy’s fooling around with her?”

Clint spends exactly one half-second imagining Derek Bishop being interested enough in his daughter to molest her and then shakes his head. “No.”

“Then the only thing we get outta negotiating a plea deal is making both her and your buddy Wilson squirm.” Clint snorts a laugh and finally forces himself to glance at Fury. The man’s still standing with his back to the window, but the longer they stare at one another, the more the lines of his body soften. He slowly shakes his head again. “Don’t think for one second this is how I wanted the case to go.”

Clint shrugs. “You didn’t want a battle royale or another trial of public opinion. I get it.”

“I also don’t want to do more harm to this girl than we do good,” Fury replies lightly. Clint frowns, and Fury replies with a snort of a laugh. “She’s a messed-up kid who needs a lot more than the six months of ‘shock time’ in juvenile hall that this office can give her.”

“You sure about that, sir?”

“No, but I know for a fact that you are.”

He dismisses Clint in his usual way, turning back to the window and folding his hands behind his back until Clint realizes that the conversation’s over and lets himself out. He walks back to his desk the long way, observing the usual hustle and bustle of a slowly-waking office. Stark and Bruce bicker mildly about something in Stark’s office doorway, an argument that’s resolved enough by the time Clint passes them that he catches Tony reeling his guy in for an unprofessional kiss; at Peggy’s desk, she and Jane laugh about her latest unsuccessful round of speed dating, squinting at an unflattering Facebook picture of some guy from the bar. 

He passes Phil’s and Maria’s offices. Maria glances up from her big pile of paperwork and smiles at him, and he forces a smile back as he keeps walking.

He dumps his coffee down the break room sink and steals a Dr. Pepper out of the twelve pack that lives in the bottom of the fridge. Nobody knows exactly who it belongs to, even though they all steal from it and leave apologetic IOU post-its. Clint scribbles his name under Pepper’s, then walks back into his office and shuts the door.

He’s halfway through the drink a half-hour later when Darcy appears, her arms laden with files and her hair hanging in her face. “All of these have motions to amend or dismiss or _whatever_ and just need your signature,” she reports, dumping them into his inbox and heaving a sigh. “Fandral left a message about rescheduling that Wednesday sentencing—something about Franklin County, I don’t know, his cell phone kept cutting out—and why do you look like somebody just killed your cat?”

Clint blinks at her. “What?”

“You look like somebody turned Sandy into a road pancake, all frowny-faced and stuff.” He rolls his eyes and reaches for his soda. “Your cat didn’t actually die, did she?”

“No, Darcy, my cat didn’t die.” She tips her head at him as he sips his drink, and he swallows instead of sighing. He shakes his head a little. “Do me a favor and call Wade. I want to cancel the Bishop status conference, but he’s not answering my texts.”

“Uh, I’m not your secretary.”

“No, you’re my trial assistant, which means fielding phone calls _is_ actually in your job description.” She flips her hair as she heads to the door, and he smiles for what feels like the first time since he walked into the office that morning. He’s reaching for the first file on the stack when he realizes she’s hovering in the doorway. “What?”

“Nothing’s actually wrong, is it?” For the first time since the joke about the cat, he catches the concern flooding her face. “You can tell me, you know. I am your secret-keeper.”

He laughs a little and shakes his head. “Nothing’s wrong,” he promises, and she studies him for a second longer before finally walking out of his office. She leaves the door cracked, though, and he’s able to listen as calls Wade and immediately launches into an argument about the relative merits of Wonder Woman without even saying hello.

Clint smiles to himself and starts signing motions to dismiss.

By the fourth or fifth, he actually convinces himself that’s nothing wrong, too.

 

==

 

“I’m going to be joining you for the next twenty minutes,” Maria announces in the doorway of Steve’s office at lunch on Wednesday, and Tony jerks so hard at the sound of her voice that he almost dumps his sandwich on the floor. He definitely kicks over his closed bottle of soda, and it rolls across the floor and disappears under Steve’s desk.

Maria sighs. “You are so dramatic.”

“And you’re the very embodiment of evil, given human form and sent to walk among the living,” Tony retorts. He steals a slice of pickle off Bruce’s sandwich paper and pops it in his mouth. “I think that makes us right about even.”

Bucky glances over at Clint, confused, and Clint shrugs. Wednesdays are usually pretty calm around the office—Phil calls it the “mid-week lull”—and today’s no exception. Clint’d spent his morning catching up on some filing and recovering from a Tuesday afternoon so awful that he’d refused to talk with Phil about it until after he’d drunk half a beer; while waiting for Tony to show up with their lunches, he’d learned that Steve and Bucky have been doing pretty much the same thing. 

Bruce, on the other hand, had plopped down in one of the chairs across from Steve’s desk, his hair a mess of unruly curls and his tie loose and crooked.

“Fun docket?” Bucky’d asked, grinning. 

“For the next fifteen minutes, I’m pretending that this is all a bad dream and that I stayed in India,” he’d returned, and Steve’d offered a sympathetic smile while Clint and Bucky’d laughed.

Bucky frowns as Maria closes and locks Steve’s office door. “You know people in this office only lock doors right before they have sex, right?”

“Unless they’re Barton and don’t have a lock,” Tony points out. Clint narrows his eyes at him, and he raises both hands. “Hey, for once I am not belittling the truly horrifying amount of sex with which you and Blandface have sullied those pillows. I am simply making an observation that someday, someone will walk in on you two and go spontaneously blind.”

“And what happens when they walk in on you and Bruce?” Bucky asks. Steve shoots him a warning look, and he rolls his eyes. “Just because you mutter about professionalism every time I kiss you in the office doesn’t mean I can’t ask.”

“Okay, first, we are returning to discuss _that_ when Hill is not glaring a hole in the back of my head,” Tony notes, gesturing back and forth between Steve and Bucky. “And second, I think it’s obvious that catching us in the act would inspire greatness. Right, big guy?”

Bruce sighs and shakes his head, but Clint catches the way the corner of his mouth kicks up into a little grin. Tony nudges him in the arm, he nudges back, and in the end, Tony steals another pickle slice.

Maria crosses her arms under her breasts. “Are you done now?” 

“Depends on whether you’re annoyed enough to leave,” Tony responds with a shrug.

She snorts at him. “Since leaving means going back into the hallway with Ken Blake, I’ll pass.”

Steve immediately asks, “Ken who?”, but Clint just stops chewing. The turkey and cheese turn to ash in his mouth, and he reaches for his soda before he chokes on the entire mouthful. When the room erupts into a the usual chaos, he thinks maybe none of them’ve noticed; Tony and Bucky start a tag-team joke about Maria’s collection of spurned lovers, Bruce returns to his sandwich, and Steve employs his best _I missed something, didn’t I?_ face.

But when Clint finally forces everything down the right pipe, he realizes that Maria’s watching him.

He rolls his lips together. 

“Now, to be fair,” Tony continues, picking up on Bucky’s last comment, “it’s probably not her fault that she’s so demanding in bed, what with Daddy issues and—”

“Ken Blake,” Maria interrupts, shooting Stark a murderous look, “is a federal prosecutor with the District of Colorado. He worked in this office until a state position opened up in Denver, then worked there until he made the jump to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

“And you’re avoiding him?” Steve asks, brow furrowing. 

“Yes.”

“Because you slept with him?” Tony waggles his eyebrows as she rolls her eyes, and Bruce sends him a sharp glance. He shrugs and raises his hands. “Hey, I’m just reading the room here.”

“I did not sleep with Ken Blake,” Maria informs him tightly. Bucky quirks an eyebrow, and she sighs. “Trust me. I would not sleep with Ken Blake if he was the last man on earth and the survival of our species depended on it.”

Bruce frowns. “Actually, I think you’d need two breeding couples to successfully—”

“I sometimes wish I’d married you for your looks alone,” Tony interrupts. Bruce’s frown deepens, but he shrugs it off. “So,” he says to Maria, “you don’t like this guy but not because of the inadequacy of his disco stick.”

Bucky flinches. “That’s disturbing.”

“And although it pains me to say it,” Tony continues, waving the other man off with a flick of his wrist, “you’re actually not enough of a complete asshole to hate people without having a reason, which suggests maybe he’s earned his way into your prestigious _not even if my nether regions were a barren wasteland_ category.”

Clint tries not to wince at that particular description—or in anticipation of how hard Maria will “accidentally” stomp on Tony’s toe in retaliation—when he realizes that everyone’s staring blankly in Tony’s direction. Tony’s smug smile falters a little when he notices it, too, his face bunching in a combination of confusion and minor annoyance. “What?”

Steve presses his lips together. “Did you just say something _nice_ about Maria?” he asks slowly. 

“Let’s not change the definition of ‘nice,’” Maria suggests, but there’s a tiny smile pushing at the corners of her mouth. “It just wasn’t insulting.”

“I always suspected marriage would mellow him,” Steve replies, hiding his triumphant smirk in his sandwich.

Tony releases a weird sputtering grunt of agony and defeat that everybody except Bruce ignores. Bruce, for his part, at least pats Tony’s knee before asking, “If Blake’s a federal prosecutor, why exactly is he here?” 

“Because he’s friends with Phil,” Clint says without thinking, and for the first time since Maria walked in, everybody turns to stare at him. He shrugs, still twisting the cap to his soda bottle. “I’ve never met him,” he clarifies. “I just know they’re friends.”

“They’re ‘show up at work in the middle of the day on Wednesday’ friends?” Bucky asks, frowning.

“I guess,” Clint answers, but his gut tightens and gnaws at itself anyway. Aside from when Phil checked his missed calls after their run a week ago, there’s been no new news about the mysterious Ken Blake; it feels weird, somehow, that a guy who only ever wanted to pick Phil’s brain is now lurking around their office, states away from his cushy federal job. When he realizes that everybody’s still staring at him, he holds up his hands. “Hey, we’re not the creepy kind of couple who stalks each other’s friends on Facebook, okay?”

Tony snorts. “You say that like friend-stalking doesn’t breed a deeper, more abiding love,” he says, and Clint rolls his eyes. Tony, though, just keeps frowning. “So on a scale of Steve ‘I’ve only kissed one person in my entire life and then felt obligated to marry him’ Rogers—”

“Hey!” Steve protests, and Clint laughs at Bucky’s smug little grin.

“—to Maria ‘I once lived my life like Russell Brand in the years before he pretended to settle down with Katy Perry’ Hill—”

“In no version of the universe am I the most promiscuous one in this room,” Maria points out, her hands falling to her hips.

“—how totally ex-tastic is this ex-boyfriend of Coulson’s?” Before anyone can respond, Tony snaps his fingers and then points them at Maria. “And that’s ‘formerly promiscuous,’ thank you very much.”

Bruce sighs. “I’m so glad I married you.”

“And they’re not exes,” Clint informs the room. He thinks his voice sounds neutral and disinterested—an easy response from the man who knows all the important people in his boyfriend’s life—but Tony immediately raises both his eyebrows. When Clint glances up at Maria, she rolls her shoulders in a tiny shrug. He sighs. “We’ve done the laundry list thing,” he says. “He’s never mentioned a Ken.”

“You don’t always want to tell the guy you’re now with about all the guys who came before,” Bucky points out. Clint tries not to roll his eyes. “No, really. He got the young, hot up-and-comer. Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about the old, less-hot, former up-and-comer.”

Steve tips his head in his husband’s direction. “You’ve told me the name and hair color of every girl you ever goosed on the elementary school playground, Bucky,” he notes. He tosses a glance in Clint’s direction. “Honesty’s important in a relationship.”

“Yeah, and I’m not concerned about _our_ relationship,” Bucky retorts. “I’m worried about Phil’s ex-boyfriend coming to visit him at the office in the middle of the day.”

Clint rubs the side of his neck. “They’re _not_ exes,” he says again. Bucky’s frown deepens. “They’re not. They went to school together, then they worked together for a while. Ad now, they pick each other’s brains.”

“Sounds like a euphemism,” Tony mutters, and Bruce elbows him hard enough that he grunts.

“And just because you’re all married, boring, and need something juicy to sink your teeth into doesn’t mean—”

The door rattles hard enough in its jamb that it sounds like Marley dragging his chains around in _A Christmas Carol_ , and Clint jerks too hard in his seat to finish his sentence. Tony and Maria both spring away from the door like it might swing open and hit them, and Steve swears under his breath when he bangs his knee under his desk in surprise. Even Bucky, a man who once called himself “the only thing that goes bump in the night,” chokes on his soda.

A half-second later, the rattling’s replaced with a firm knock. “Can I interrupt the lunchtime meeting of the minds, or do I need to come back at one?” Phil’s muffled voice asks. His tone’s light and amused, full of his usual warmth, and Clint forgets all the ex-related bullshit to crack his own smile. 

Steve glances at the lock and then, a bit more carefully, at Maria. She sighs. “I can try not to murder him, but I make no promises.”

“Just don’t get blood on Dot’s artwork,” Bucky comments, and Steve grins at him a little while Maria reaches over and finally unlocks the door.

“Watch, they’ll have a ten-part outline for reducing the county’s budget deficit all worked up and ready to go,” Phil jokes as he steps into the cramped office, and Tony rolls his eyes like the idea’s personally offended him. A few steps behind Phil is a thin man in a dark suit. Clint’s first thought is that he’s a lot older than Phil—his face is sterner and marred by deep, heavy lines—but he realizes when they stand shoulder-to-shoulder that they’re at most two or three years apart. The other guy just wears the years less gracefully. He also holds himself ramrod straight and tight-shouldered, his face stony and unamused.

Maria’s jaw works, and Clint wonders how hard she’s resisting her urge to roll her eyes—or worse.

“Steps one through six involve firing all the file clerks and installing a Starbucks in the back office,” Tony says suddenly, and Clint jerks out of his thoughts to realize that Stark’s stood to offer Blake his hand. Phil’s mouth twitches into the tight, unamused smile he saves for Stark alone, and he tosses Clint a quick glance.

Clint raises his hands. “I’m not his keeper.”

“Though he does require a licensed zoologist to manage all his shots,” Bucky offers, grinning. Out of the corner of his eye, Clint thinks he catches Steve half-glaring across the tiny office. Bucky grins harder.

Tony rolls his eyes. “You’re all very funny, and when I die, I will expressly instruct Bruce and the kid to never let even one cent from my estate near your grubby little paws.” He turns back to Blake, his hand still floating in midair. Blake just _looks_ at it. “Tony Stark,” he introduces. “Undefeated at oral argument. I’m sure Coulson’s sung my praises.”

“From the rooftops,” Blake says flatly, and Clint grits his teeth to keep from laughing aloud. Maria ducks her head to hide the half-second twinkle in her eye. “Ken Blake, U.S. Attorney’s Office for—”

“District of Colorado, I heard,” Tony interrupts. He drops his still-unshaken hand and glances over at Phil. “Was blandness a requirement for graduating in your law school class? Because I’d like to have a conversation with the admissions counselors that year, maybe do a study and—”

“Tony.” There’s hard flint in the back of Bruce’s tone, and his husband spins around to stare him down. For a long stretch of seconds, they stare at each other—Bruce with raised eyebrows, Tony with a crumpled brow. When Tony finally flops back into his chair, it’s with a sigh and an overdramatic eye-roll. 

“Sorry about that,” Bruce says pleasantly, but Clint can see how forced his polite little smile is.

“Ken, I’d like you to meet some of our best and brightest—and Tony,” Phil says without missing a beat. He grins like his jaw’s not locked in a tight line, but Clint knows better. Clint can read the guy like a book, interpreting the line of his shoulders and the purse of his lips without even thinking about it. Phil’s annoyance is pretty obvious, but there’s something else rippling deep under the surface, too. Clint just can’t figure out what exactly it _is_. “You’ve met Maria, of course,” Phil continues, and Maria raises a hand in a half-hearted wave, “but we have Doctor Bruce Banner—our child welfare guru, not that you really need one of those at the federal level—and then three more of our criminal prosecutors: James Barnes, Steve Rogers, and Clint Barton.” 

Phil’s eyes linger on Clint, the flash of a genuine smile replacing fake one, and Clint feels his own shoulders soften. They watch one another while Blake’s steady gaze sweeps the room. Clint expects the guy to reach out and offer his hand to at least some of them, or maybe to just crack a smile, but the most Blake manages is sliding his hands into his pants pockets. 

“Nice to meet you all,” he says evenly, and Tony makes no attempt to hide his little huff of disgust. “Your office has some of the best conviction rates—”

“And appeal rates,” Tony mutters. Both Bruce and Steve glare at him, and Clint catches Phil’s fingers curling into fists at his sides.

Blake’s mouth twitches into an expression that, on some people, might amount to a smile. On him, it’s as much grimace as anything else. “Some of the best success rates in the Midwest, let’s put it that way,” he amends. He glances at Maria. “Congratulations on your promotion, by the way.”

She leans her hip against Steve’s desk, disinterested, and offers Blake one tiny nod. “Thanks.” 

They stare each other down for a tense few seconds, the whole room shrouded in an uneasy silence. Finally, Blake looks back to Phil. “I’m only here until early tomorrow, so we should probably—”

Phil nods. “Right.” He twists back to face the group of them, and suddenly, Clint realizes exactly what’s lurking under Phil’s usually-plastic surface.

Because right here, in Steve’s office and with his old friend at his side, Phil’s no longer Clint’s sarcastic, easy-going boyfriend who rolls up his sleeves two-thirds of the way through the work day and stops by Clint’s office after lunch to steal his leftover potato chips. No, next to Blake, Phil’s Chief Assistant District Attorney Coulson: stoic, serious, and perpetually unsmiling.

Clint’s stomach clenches into a rock at the thought, and he nearly misses joining in on the polite goodbyes as Blake leads Phil out of the office. Phil pauses at the door, and in one split second, he flashes Clint a smile that proves the real Phil’s still in there somewhere.

The door settles heavily in its jamb behind them.

“That guy is a Grade-A, USDA approved, extra tasty crispy _dickhead_ ,” Tony declares, throwing up his hands. Clint suspects he’d pace the room if it were just a little bigger. “And thanks, by the way,” he adds, looking at Bruce. “You performed the role of ‘supportive husband who defends my honor’ with extra gusto.”

Bruce rolls his eyes. “I wasn’t aware you had honor left to defend.”

Tony crosses his arms over his chest. “I will divorce you where you sit, Banner.”

“Okay, Tony’s sulking aside, that guy really was a douchebag,” Bucky agrees. He lobs his balled-up sandwich paper at Steve’s garbage can, and Steve sighs when it bounces off the rim and rolls away. “How did he work here without Fury murdering him?”

“Because he’s not a horrible attorney,” Maria replies. She’s still standing against Steve’s desk, her whole body drawn up tight. She’s so coiled into herself that Clint wonders for a second whether she and Blake actually slept together—or, worse, whether Blake _told_ people they did. She shakes her head. “He’s ambitious and he’s prickly, but he’s smart,” she admits. “He can charm a jury at a hundred paces. To hear some of the stories, Melinda May on her best day couldn’t turn a losing case into a winner as fast as he can on his worst.”

Bruce rolls his lips together. “But?” 

Maria snorts. “But something about him has always rubbed me the wrong way.”

“Do people actually rub you the _right_ way, though?” Tony immediately asks. Maria glares at him, and he holds up his hands. He smiles, but not brightly enough to reach his eyes. Clint thinks maybe Blake’s aggressive disinterest left a lasting impression. 

At his desk, Steve chuckles a little. “He’s still nursing his wounds from when you wouldn’t dance at him at the last Urban Ascent fundraiser,” he points out.

“She wouldn’t, or she _couldn’t_ because my raw talent would render her speechless?”

“Wouldn’t,” Bucky and Maria answer in unison, and Maria actually laughs. 

Their lunch disperses only a couple minutes later, with Maria letting herself out of the office and Bruce murmuring apologies about a hearing that afternoon. Tony springs up out of his seat and follows on Bruce’s heels, his fingers sneaking into the man’s belt loops before they’re even out of sight. Clint tries very hard not to think about what kinda ego-rebuilding might happen once they’re back in Bruce’s office. He _likes_ working in Bruce’s office, after all. He’s not sure he wants to stop because of the horrible things that happen every time his buddy closes the door behind him.

He’s still balling up his sandwich paper when Bucky kisses Steve on the corner of the mouth and disappears into the hall, leaving his husband to roll his eyes as he sweeps crumbs off his desk. “He’s still learning the meaning of ‘discreet,’” he comments to Clint, but he’s smiling. 

Clint snorts. “You could grope each other in the hallway and still be the most discreet couple in the building.”

Steve laughs. “You’re a hard man to shake up, you know that?” he asks, and Clint frowns. After a second or two, Steve shrugs. “If one of my law school buddies showed up here unannounced, Bucky’d lose his mind.”

“And if one of his law school buddies showed up?”

“We had a baby when he started law school. His only buddies were the cast members from _Yo Gabba Gabba_.” Clint finally laughs, shaking his head as he collects his soda and half-finished back of chips. “But seriously,” Steve presses, “I’m glad you two don’t worry about that kind of stuff. After everything you went through together last fall, I’d expect a little more—”

He trails off, one big hand grasping at the air like he’s searching for the words he wants, and Clint cracks a tiny grin. “Pathological distrust?” 

Steve releases an embarrassed little huff of breath. “Something like that,” he replies, and Clint keeps grinning as he shuts the door behind him.

It’s a good hour later when he glances up from his stack of files and realizes that Phil’s never stopped by for his leftover chips. 

“Picking his brain,” he mutters to himself, and he forces his attention back to his work.

 

==

 

“I hate to admit it, but Tony’s right about you defending his honor,” Natasha says at the bar that night, and Bruce groans as he lightly bangs his head against the side of the building.

Natasha smirks in response, and Clint can’t help but laugh at her, the warmth of beer and their conversation spreading outward from the center of his gut. It’s a balmy enough spring night that they’re sitting outside for once, away from the last few post-finals college students and the loud, obsessive sports fans. Strands of white Christmas lights—though Clint supposes they’re not really holiday-specific lights in May—cast funny little starburst shadows on their drinks, chips, and guacamole. Every time the breeze brushes past them, the lights twinkle and dance.

For the half-hour before Bruce’s Prius appeared in his driveway, Clint’d considered cancelling on his friends. He’d sat in the armchair by the window, starting and deleting a dozen texts; he’d complained about an allergy attack, about Sandy throwing up all over the kitchen floor, about Barney needing him to run out to Colier Woods for something. But every lie felt too big and messy to sound convincing, the kinda bullshit that Natasha could pick apart the second their eyes met in the hallway Thursday morning. He’d eventually abandoned all his half-started group messages and opened one to Phil, instead.

_going out with bruce and nat like normal, text me when you’re home_

He’d been changing out of his sweatpants and into jeans ten minutes later when Phil’d replied, _And here I was hoping to take advantage of you before you left._

Clint’d nearly tripped over the sweats as he’d fumbled for his phone. _too bad you’re still with blake or i’d text you pictures_ , he’d typed back with a grin.

 _They never do you justice_ , Phil’d sent back all of fifteen seconds later, and Clint’d laughed. 

“You’re not supposed to take Tony’s side,” Bruce laments after the waitress’s dropped off fresh drinks and another bowl of salsa. “You’re supposed to find him unreasonable.”

“I can find him unreasonable and still take the side of spouses who’d like their better halves to stick up for them,” Natasha retorts. She points a guacamole-heavy chip at him. “Tony would light someone on fire if the roles were reversed, and I think you know that.”

“He’d also lure you into the nearest bathroom and con you into gratitude sex afterward,” Clint adds.

Natasha nods. “And there’s that.”

“I’m not denying that I could’ve been less—passive,” Bruce replies after a few seconds, his thumb smoothing along his half-empty glass. “But he turns everything into a confrontation, and it’s exhausting.”

“But you find it endearing, too,” Natasha challenges. Bruce drops his eyes to study the surface of his beer. “You’re charmed by Tony’s endless string of confrontations, I’m charmed by Pepper’s obsession with cost-prohibitive shoes, Phil’s charmed by Clint’s pretend disinterest—”

Clint holds up his hands. “Hey, whatever you’re talking about doesn’t apply to _my_ relationship. Leave us out of it.”

She tips her head in his direction, all raised eyebrows and pursed lips, and Clint tips his head right back at her. “You’re not the least bit curious about Blake?” she presses.

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” he shoots right back. Across the table, Bruce sips his beer with one of his purposely-placid expressions. Clint rolls his eyes at the two of them. “I don’t need to index every human being Phil’s ever spoken to in order to trust him, you know.”

“Tell me none of this smells a little funky to you,” Bruce says. Clint shrugs and scrapes a huge chunk of guacamole out of the bowl. “Because it’s one thing for him to visit a friend at work, but it’s another for him to be aggressively rude to everyone he meets.”

Clint snorts. “Tony isn’t everyone.”

“Tony’s not the only one he treated like crap, Clint,” Natasha counters. She leans her arms on the table, her long fingers tapping idle patterns on her beer bottle. “I was working with Jane when Phil brought him around. Blake barely acknowledged the trial assistants. I think he would’ve written me off if he couldn’t see down my shirt.”

Clint flashes her a shitty grin. “Do you blame him?” When her eyes flash dark and angry, he laughs and leans away from her. “Okay, so he’s a prick,” he admits, Natasha’s shoulders soften slowly, “but so what? Phil’s buddies with Maria, and she’s not exactly warm and fuzzy. Maybe he’s got shitty social skills or something.” He shrugs. “Not everything that happens in our office’s a cog in some fucked-up doom machine. Sometimes, it’s just a lousy friend stopping by for a visit.”

Bruce sets down his glass carefully, his lips pressed into a tight line. “Do you really believe that?” he asks quietly.

“What else am I supposed to believe?” Clint returns. 

Funny how neither of them can answer that one.

Phil’s sedan is in the driveway when Clint finally shows up at home, and he waves the Prius off with a grin before he heads inside. Phil’s shoes are in the front hall, his blazer tossed over the back of a chair in the living room and his bag resting against the corner where the hallway branches off toward the office and bedroom. Easy, too-warm relief blooms in Clint’s gut, and for the first time, he maybe admits to himself that he’s a little suspicious of Ken Blake. Not because he necessarily thinks Blake’s some ex-boyfriend come to reclaim his man or anything, but because he sometimes still feels like he and Phil are settling in.

Like they’re building a house, and while the foundation’s dry, it’s not quite ready to support too much weight.

There’s half a pizza left on the kitchen counter, but Clint’s too full of chips and guacamole to really pay attention. Instead, he grabs a beer and heads off onto the patio, where Phil’s sitting in a lawn chair and staring out into the back yard.

The tiny ball of gray on his lap raises its head blearily and then curls back up, and Clint grins. “I thought you wanted her to be an inside cat,” he comments. He stops to rub the back of Phil’s neck before he grabs his own chair, and Phil releases a long, painfully-content sigh that settles deep into Clint’s gut. “You gave me a ten-minute lecture on feline leukemia.”

Phil tips his head forward in silent invitation, and Clint runs his fingers along the short hair at the back of his neck. He sighs again. “She wouldn’t stop yelling at me to let her out.”

“She’s a cat, boss. She meows, not yells.”

“You try telling that to my eardrums,” Phil retorts, and Clint chuckles. His fingers settle just above the collar of Phil’s shirt. Phil raises his head, his eyes soft and careful, and for a couple seconds, they stare at one another in the mostly-dark of their patio. Aside from their neighbor’s annoying bug zapper, it really feels like they’re alone, the two of them against the world.

Clint finally remembers how to breathe. “You been home long?”

“Long enough,” Phil answers. His eyes linger, studying what feels like every inch of Clint’s body as Clint finally sinks into the other patio chair. Sandy glances over again, almost like she’s considering swapping out laps; when Clint cracks open his beer bottle, though, she tucks her head under a paw. Phil chuckles. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Yeah, but you love when I’m ridiculous,” Clint retorts. They grin at each other, but Clint can easily see how tired Phil looks, and how the smile never quite reaches his eyes. He necks the beer for a minute and then sets it down on the patio. “You gonna tell me what gives?” he asks.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning your buddy Blake shows up at work without warning, pisses pretty much everybody off, keeps you in the office ‘til late–and then, when I come home, you’re weird.” Phil snorts a little, shaking his head, and then drops his gaze to the cat. “Look, I don’t care if the guy’s a prick,” Clint presses. “Tony deserved what he got, and even if he didn’t, Barney’s worse than Blake on a _good_ day. But where I come from, you take your friend out for dinner and invite him to meet your guy when he visits instead of locking yourself in an office all day.”

For a second, the corners of Phil’s eyes crinkle. “And here, I believed all your stories of a horribly homophobic upbringing.”

“Turns out people aren’t sympathetic about being forced to play ‘smear the straight’ in grade school,” Clint shoots right back, and Phil laughs. He reaches over and nudges Phil’s arm a little, a mostly-gentle elbowing. Before he can pull away, though, Phil captures his hand and tangles their fingers. A wave of dread washes over Clint, ready to drown him. “Okay, you gotta tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“You pull me into every one of your jury selections ‘cause of how well I read people. I fucking know when something’s wrong.” Phil stays quiet, so Clint squeezes his hand. “If you don’t wanna talk about it, fine, but then tell me you don’t instead of—”

“Ken didn’t just come to pick my brain,” Phil admits, and all at once Clint feels like somebody’s dropped a ton of bricks onto his chest. His breath escapes in a little rush, and as much as he tries to ignore it, a voice in his head that sounds a lot like his friends taunts _you were wrong, you idiot_. 

Next to him, Phil stares out at their empty yard. “It’s not the first time he’s come to visit,” he explains, “and not even the first time he’s shown up unannounced. Ken— He’s a little like Stark, actually, always expecting that the world revolves, at least in part, around him. Our advisor at law school liked to say that the most ambitious attorneys all have that in common. I think it’s one of the reasons Maria hates him so much.”

“She definitely tried to avoid him when he showed up.”

Phil releases a little huff of laughter. “Maria could watch that man rescue blind orphans from a five-alarm fire and _still_ categorize him only as a passable human being.”

Clint laughs. “Tony thinks they hooked up.”

“She wouldn’t sleep with him if we were in the middle of the zombie apocalypse and his penis would inoculate her against becoming one of the mindless horde.” Another bark of laughter leaps from Clint’s throat, so unexpected that his chair teeters. Sandy bunches into an even tighter ball, and Phil rests his free hand on her tiny, fuzzy side. “I honestly thought he just wanted some advice on working with the state prosecutors up in Denver,” he continues after a couple more seconds. “Six or seven years ago, we had a federal overlap case in our office that spiraled out of control. Fury ended up trying to justify our so-called lack of cooperation to the _Bugle_ , the reporters blew it out of proportion . . . I’m still surprised that it didn’t cost him the reelection.”

He shakes his head again, and Clint feels himself swallow. “But Blake’s not worried about that.”

“No.” Phil’s eyes are full to bursting with something like fear when he looks over, and Clint swears for a second that his heart stops. “Ken— Well, I guess you could say Ken propositioned me today.”

There’s nothing flinty or angry in his tone—if anything, he’s unusually reserved, almost like he’s holding himself back behind a barricade, and Clint realizes only after he’s swallowed around the lump in his throat that he’s got no idea what to say. He wets his lips. “I’m guessing it’s not the kind of offer where you end up having sex with him while I watch,” he comments carefully.

Phil rolls his eyes. “Are you a full-time student at the Tony Stark School of Making Everything About Sex, or are you only taking the correspondence course?” Clint tries to flash him a winning smile in response, but he immediately knows it’s fallen flat. Really, everything feels flat, from Phil’s deadpan comment to the way they try to chuckle at the joke. Clint stares out into the yard, focusing on the quiet of the night the feel of Phil’s thumb against his skin. It’s only after he’s dipped his head down to his feet that he realizes there are two empty beer bottles under Phil’s chair.

He tries not to think about what that means.

“Ken’s office is in shambles right now,” Phil finally says. He’s staring out across the yard, too, his face completely controlled. “His boss is on the retirement track, one prosecutor just left and another’s on maternity leave for the next six weeks, and their civil litigation and appellate departments are so bogged down that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t lift their personnel for the Novak case.”

Clint hardly recognizes his own voice when he asks, “That murder from the news?”

Phil nods. “Right.” His thumb pauses on the side of Clint’s hand, and finally, he glances over. His eyes sweep across Clint’s face, searching it steadily, and Clint feels his stomach turn to stone. Since the end of the Killgrave trial, he’s worried about a million things—his friends, his brother, his job, their stupid cat—but he’s never really worried about _them_. They’d felt strong and steadfast, a stone mountain face refusing to yield to a crazy storm.

Now, he can’t help thinking that he’s a blind idiot, the kind who stands at the foot of the mountain and misses the avalanche until he’s buried by ten feet of snow.

“The relationship between the U.S. Attorney’s office and the local team’s too adversarial for him to trust them. They need someone in the office who can be an intermediary between the two teams and hopefully pick up some of the slack.” Phil pulls in a sharp breath. “Ken’s asked me to come to Denver as a special prosecutor until the prosecutor on maternity leave comes back to work.”

“In Denver,” Clint repeats, but his own voice sounds far away. He tugs his hand away from Phil’s to drag his fingers through his hair and only realizes how it must look when Phil abruptly glances down at their feet. “Sorry,” Clint says quickly, “it’s just— I mean, you said a couple days ago you thought Blake’d pick your brain and disappear, not drag you off to Denver and—”

“I know,” Phil cuts him off. He raises both hands, a tiny defensive gesture, and Clint clasps his hands together between his knees. “He spent an hour tonight trying to convince me to accept before I talked to anyone, because apparently your boss and partner don’t matter when compared to the siren call of the federal prosecutor’s office.” He offers Clint one tiny, humorless smile, and Clint snorts without smiling back. “I don’t know how I feel about it yet. And even if I wanted to go, I have a feeling Fury’d take one look at our backlog before laughing in my face.”

Clint knows his smile’s faded away by the size of the lump in his throat. He swallows hard around it. “Do you want to go?”

“I don’t know.” Phil’s eyes search his for a few long seconds. “And if I do decide I’m interested, I won’t go without your blessing.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “Yeah, ‘cause I should be a deciding factor in whether you should spend a couple months as a special prosecutor,” he retorts before necking his beer. 

When he glances back over at Phil, he realizes that his careful eyes never left his face. “You’re a deciding factor in everything,” he says quietly, and Clint knows without thinking about it that Phil _means_ it.

 

==

 

Late that night, Clint stares at their bedroom ceiling while Phil sleeps soundly next to him, the other man’s head pillowed on his shoulder and an arm thrown across his chest. He’d forgotten until Phil nodded off how easily they roll together in bed, tangling legs and arms until they’re all wrapped around each other. Toddlers and pets are meant to cling in their sleep, not grown men.

At least, not most grown men.

Clint tries to imagine sleeping alone again after the last few months. He glances at Phil’s side of the bed, all rumpled covers and uneven pillows, and pictures it empty.

It’s nearly impossible to think about, and the sudden flood of loneliness that follows the thought almost suffocates him.

He finds it pretty hard to sleep, after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Although I do know that some state-level prosecutors can be cross-designated as special prosecutors at the federal level, I know nothing of the process or its intricacies. Consider this an example of creative license. 
> 
> The most recent MPU posting schedule can be found [here](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/72835167945/behold-the-mpu-posting-schedule-through-the-end).


	7. Physical and Metaphorical Distance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, Clint waits for Phil to make a decision—and tries to keep that waiting from eating him alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains some sexual content which, while not explicit, may well render it NSFW.
> 
> As I said last time: I line-edited this after it was beta-read, so mistakes are most likely my own. But thanks to Jen and saranoh for catching my egregious errors and setting me right early on so I _can_ edit this bastard.

“I could be having sex right now,” Tony complains from the kitchen island, glaring over the tops of his glasses and pointing a finger toward the kitchen nook. “I could be having glorious, filthy Thursday night sex. Instead, I am apparently hosting a rerun of last night’s ‘girl talk’ because you’re having some sort of ridiculous personal drama.”

“Technically, I’m hosting the rerun,” Bruce returns. He hip-checks the refrigerator shut, beer in hand. “You don’t even need to be here.”

“And you wouldn’t be having sex, you’d be watching that Lucy Liu show!” Miles calls through from the living room. 

“Lucy Liu is a national treasure!” Tony shouts back, and for the first time since he showed up, Clint actually allows himself a tiny, half-uncertain smile. 

It’s just after dinner on Thursday night, a fact that Clint knows because he’d eaten leftover pizza alone in his kitchen, staring at the clock on the microwave and waiting for some kinda news from Phil. Blake’d left the state that morning—Phil’d woken up early to grab coffee with the guy and see him off, a weird gesture of decency that didn’t really sit right with Clint—and it’d left Clint feeling off the whole damn day. He’d tried not to think about Denver and the stupid fucking Novak case as he worked through his files, but in every time he stopped to refill his coffee mug or piss, his mind’d flickered right back to the night before. He’d spent his lunch locked in his office like a lovesick teenager, Google-mapping the distance to Denver (around five hours in a car) and counting out six weeks on the calendar.

Six weeks landed in the middle of July, he’d discovered, and his stomach’d sunk down into his shoes. Six weeks meant Phil’d be gone for Clint’s birthday and his own, for Tony’s stupid Independence Day barbeque (filled with illegal fireworks), and for what was technically their first anniversary. Even if he headed home on the weekends, six weeks covered everything important—and worse, it felt like a goddamn lifetime.

Bruce hands Clint the beer, and he smiles his thanks before he swigs it. It’s crisp and hoppy, the way Phil prefers his beers, and Clint hates how his stomach drops at that.

“Sorry I’m late!” Natasha calls from the front hallway, and Tony rolls his eyes as he heads off to the living room. By the time Natasha makes it to the kitchen, the dogs are cantering around her like she’s the greatest human person in the history of planet—not that Clint can blame them. She’s wearing clingy yoga pants and a pretty tight tank top, her hair still damp from the shower. “I got the ‘I am not paying for your hot yoga membership if you’re not going to use it’ talk after work today.”

“Your girlfriend makes you do hot yoga?” Clint asks. “I can’t decide if that’s adorable or terrifying.”

“This from the man who reads Wikipedia entries on zombie comics so he can understand what his boyfriend’s talking about,” she retorts, flipping him off. Bruce hides his grin as he finishes pouring himself a cup of tea; he nods to the kettle, but Natasha just wiggles her water bottle as she slides into the breakfast nook next to Clint. “I take it on good authority that the comics are readable, you know.”

Clint snorts. “Whose authority? Because there’s no way Pepper reads comic books.”

Exactly on cue, Miles saunters in the kitchen. He heads toward the fridge with lazy teenage disinterest, but Clint catches the way he glances over at the long, pale line of Natasha’s bare arms. He’s so engrossed in watching her that he almost nails himself on the corner of the island.

Bruce raises an eyebrow. “You can say hello to our guests,” he says. 

Miles rolls his eyes and huffs, pure thirteen-year-old boy, and shrugs lightly. “Hey, Natasha,” he says. His fingers flex a little too hard around the fridge handle.

Natasha offers him an easy smile. “I heard you’re starting a geology camp in two weeks,” she says, and Miles’s face lights up like a fucking Christmas tree for three seconds; even after he stomps on it, it glimmers in his eyes. “Something about an archeological dig?”

“Yeah, in the hills,” Miles replies immediately. He sounds genuinely excited for a second, then scowls at himself. When Bruce snorts a laugh, Miles shoots him a pissy little look. “Might be cool.”

“Well, I hope you have fun,” she responds. Another gleeful grin pops up on Miles’s face, but he hides it by tugging the fridge open and dragging out a soda. He retreats back to the living room without another word and promptly unpauses his game.

“Smooth,” Tony intones.

“Shut _up_ ,” Miles retorts, and Clint really hopes the explosions on the game cover up the way he, Bruce, and Natasha snicker together.

The laughter stops around the time that Bruce settles across from Clint and Natasha, his mug of heavily-spiced tea pressed between his palms. He looks right at Clint, no fanfare or run-up, and Clint stares down at his beer bottle. It’s one of those dark brown bottles, the kind where you’re not sure what color the beer is, and he tries to decide whether the amber hue’s a trick of the glass or not.

Somewhere in the silence, Natasha elbows him. “What’s going on?” she asks quietly. He glances at her for a couple seconds, and she raises her eyebrows. “You texted and asked to talk ‘anywhere besides home,’ Clint. That’s not exactly your normal fare.”

He shakes his head a little, the words creeping up his throat. Bruce beats him to the punch. “Is it Phil?”

“No, Phil’s just out having dinner with Fury,” Clint answers quickly. When surprise flickers across Bruce’s face, Clint sighs and drags fingers through his hair. “He texted me while I was eating and said he might be late, but he’s totally fine.”

“But something’s not fine,” Natasha guesses. He looks at his beer again and nods. He spends a couple seconds willing his mouth to _work_ and explain all the emotions that keep swirling around in his brain, but he mostly feels like he’s drowning. “Because of Blake?”

Clint snorts half a laugh. “Blake offered him a job,” he finally manages, even though every word feels like its own punch to the gut. Bruce’s mouth drops open a half-inch, and next to him, Natasha grips her plastic water bottle hard enough that it groans and crunches. “Not a permanent one,” he clarifies, raising his hands. “A temporary special prosecutor position for about six weeks, working on that Novak case that’s been on the news.”

“The triple-murder?” Bruce asks, and Clint nods. “Every news outlet in the state’s been covering that case. People are already calling it the region’s crime of the year.” He turns his mug around in his hands. “Why wouldn’t they tap a local prosecutor for the job instead of bringing in someone from out-of-state?”

“According to Phil, the local authorities aren’t cooperating too well. Plus, I think Blake trusts him.” He sighs, leaning back against the hard back of the bench. “It’s stupid,” he admits after a couple more seconds. “I should be shoving him out the door with a packed suitcase telling him to get the bastard. It’s what we _do_. But the way this guy swooped in, wanting him for six whole weeks, I don’t—”

Words fail him just then, so he lets the sentence dangle for a while and just shakes his head. Bruce sips his tea, his lips pursed into a little frown. 

Natasha, on the other hand, glances over at Clint. “What did Phil say about it?”

“About the job?”

“Yeah. Does he want to go?”

“Maybe?” Clint answers. He shrugs, and her sharp eyes narrow at him. He rubs the side of his neck. “I don’t know,” he says quietly. “He’s meeting with Fury tonight to see if it’s even possible, ‘cause of our huge felony backlog. And I have a feeling he’ll run it by Maria before he decides anything, since she’ll be the one dealing with whatever he leaves behind.” He swigs his beer, but his mouth feels dry and sandpapery even after he’s swallowed. “He says he won’t go anywhere unless I’m okay with it, but I don’t wanna be that guy.”

“What guy?” Bruce asks.

“The guy who’s so fucking possessive and insecure that he won’t let his boyfriend outta his sight.” Bruce sighs at him, shaking his head like somebody’s disappointed dad, and Natasha stares at her water bottle. “Even if he never thinks it, that’s what it’ll look like,” Clint presses. “It’ll look like I can’t handle him heading out for a while, and the next time an opportunity like this shows up, he’ll get skipped over.”

“He’s right,” Natasha replies immediately, and Clint watches as Bruce rolls his lips into a tight, pale line. “Men like Blake sniff out and feed on weakness wherever they can find it. If Phil turns this down—for any reason, Clint or not—Blake will remember. He’s an active member of the legal community in Colorado and the Tenth Circuit, and he went to law school with Phil. He won’t keep his opinion to himself.”

Clint glances over, frowning. “How’d you find out that much more about Blake?”

She shrugs. “I googled.” Across the table, Bruce’s mouth kicks up into a wry little smile, but Natasha ignores it. She leans forward, her water bottle still in her grip, and tips her head until she meets Clint’s eyes. “Clint, this is an amazing opportunity. A personal invitation to work on a federal case doesn’t crop up every day. It could open a lot of doors for _both_ of you.”

“Unless you both plan on staying in our office until you retire,” Bruce adds softly. When Clint glances over at him, he smiles gently. “I know you always wanted to be a prosecutor. I don’t know about Phil.”

“I don’t think Phil knows about Phil,” Clint replies lightly, but he knows it’s a lie the second he says it. He necks his beer, and he swears he can feel every mouthful splashing into his gut. “I can’t tell if he really wants it, or if he just told me ‘cause it’s the right thing to do,” he explains. “And I don’t want to start harassing him with questions like I don’t want him to take it.” he runs his fingers through his hair again. “He deserves a crack at this if he wants it.”

Bruce runs his fingers along the side of his mug for a couple seconds before he asks, “He’s telling Fury about the job tonight?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Because if he’s willing to go that far with it, then he wants it,” Bruce answers, and Clint knows in the pit of his gut that the guy’s right. 

He heads home after he finishes his beer, walking out to his car and trying not to think about anything. He imagines that Phil’s only discussing the job offer with Fury ‘cause he’s afraid Blake’ll pursue him until the end of time; he dreams up a world where the Novak case ends up transferred to their federal court, where Phil can prosecute from the comfort of their own home. But deep down, he knows that it’s all bullshit, the fantasies of a possessive, insecure asshole.

He hates himself for that, a little.

The house is empty when he walks in, no sign of Phil. He dumps his keys, wallet, and phone on the table in the front hall, leaves the lights off, and heads straight to bed.

He’s not sure what time it is when Sandy leaps off his gut and runs for the front door, but he covers his head with a pillow and tries to force himself back to sleep. He’s hazily drifting off when he hears footsteps, and he cracks his eyes to see dim flooding in from the hallway.

He pulls his head up, rubbing his face. “What time is it?”

Phil stills in the doorway, more a shadow than a whole man. He’s lost his jacket already, his shirt halfway open, and even though most his face is hidden by the dark, Clint can tell he’s exhausted. His shoulders slump a little as he drops his watch on the dresser. “Midnight,” he says quietly.

“Late for you.”

Phil chuckles a little, shaking his head. “I didn’t mean to wake you. You should go back to sleep.”

“You’ll just wake me up again when you climb in,” Clint returns. Phil chuckles again, a tiny, familiar sound, and wanders across the room with the cat on his heels. He strips out of his shirt and slacks, tossing them over the chair in the corner. His undershirt follows. 

Usually, Clint’d whistle and catcall. Tonight, he just watches how slowly Phil moves back into the hallway to switch off the light.

The bed sinks under Phil’s weight, and Clint’s muscle memory takes over, rolling him into Phil’s personal space until he’s spooning up along Phil’s back. Phil catches his arm as it snakes around his waist and lifts it so he can kiss Clint’s wrist. Clint tangles their legs and presses his face against the back of Phil’s shoulder, suddenly a little too awake for midnight.

They lay in the quiet for a couple minutes before Clint asks, “What’d Fury say?”

Phil releases a sound like a sigh. “He accused me of trying to give him a heart attack, then swore a blue streak and called Ken a number of names I won’t repeat in mixed company.” Clint laughs, just one stupid snore, and he swears that he _feels_ Phil smile at him. “But in the end, he told me I could go if I wanted to.”

Clint nods against Phil’s skin, nuzzling in closer. Phil traces patterns on his forearms, nonsense shapes that nearly lull Clint right into sleep. Clint wants to stay awake, talking for hours until he hashes out all the weird, conflicting emotions that keep welling up in his chest, but his tongue feels lazy and leaden all at once.

He really wants Phil to have this opportunity. He just hates how _far_ it is.

“Do you want to go?” he asks after another long stretch of silence, his lips brushing Phil’s skin.

“I don’t know,” Phil admits, and he tangles their fingers together before he drifts off to sleep.

 

==

 

“What does this even mean?” Kate Bishop demands Friday afternoon, and smacks a packet of papers right into the middle of Clint’s chest.

The hallway outside Judge English’s courtroom is pretty abandoned, save for a scraggly-looking older guy hanging out on a bench and a long line of harried-looking guys waiting to settle up their child support cases down at the far end of the hall. In fact, the only reason Kate’s managed to sneak up on him was that he’d checked the hallway all of five minutes earlier; he’s supposed to be heading down to English’s chambers to log his list of defendants who skipped out on court.

Instead, he’s staring at a pissed-off ball of dark hair and piercing eyes.

To her credit, Kate looks like she’s maybe old enough to be in college today, wearing super-short shorts and a draping purple top. Her sunglasses hold back the strands of hair that aren’t tucked into a Katniss-style braid.

On the other hand, she’s _also_ a juvenile offender, hitting him in the middle of a public hallway.

“Hey— Hey!” he barks at her, and she freezes, arm still looming and ready to strike a third time. He raises a hand, just in case. “You’re not supposed to talk to me,” he reminds her. Her jaw tightens. “And, aside from that, I’ve got _no_ idea what you’re pissed off about.”

“ _This_ ,” she insists, and Clint flinches as she shoves the rolled-up packet of paperwork into his open palm. When he doesn’t immediately grab it out of her grip, she places her free hand on her cocked hip and glares. “Heather left it for me and said I needed to sign it, but I don’t even know what it is.”

“That’s not really my problem,” he replies with a little shake of his head, but the words sound half-assed to his own ears as soon as he glances down at the first page. Because the caption there clearly reads _State v. K.E.B., a juvenile born in 1997_ , and underneath, the words _DIVERSION AGREEMENT_ jump out at him in bold-faced Times New Roman.

He rolls it back up and offers it to her. “It’s your diversion agreement.”

Kate huffs and rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I read that, and then the ten pages of legalese after it. I need to know what it _means_.”

Clint sighs. “I can’t talk to you about your case,” he says again. “You need to call your lawyer.”

Kate crosses her arms over her chest. “Daddy dearest isn’t so keen on that,” she retorts, her braid slipping from her shoulder and falling down her back. “Something about being ungrateful.”

“I’m not really an expert on family dynamics,” he admits. She cocks her head a few inches, her eyes narrowing, and he shakes his head. “Look, talk to your parents and—”

“Parent,” Kate corrects sharply. “Heather barely qualifies as human, let alone as anybody’s parent.”

“Fine, your parent,” he returns. She huffs again, tossing her head until her braid flops around, and he drags fingers through his hair. “Kate, the only way I can help you is making sure you sign these papers and stay out of—”

“Do you have kids, Mister Barton?” 

The question pretty much shatters his train of thought, and for a second, Clint only manages to gape at her. She stares right back, watching him carefully; by the time he’s worked his jaw enough to swallow, though, her expression’s softened up a little. 

“No,” he says. 

She frowns. “But you’re married, right?”

“No,” he answers again. She drops her eyes to the crappy, threadbare carpeting, her lips pursing into a tight line. “Look, Kate,” he says after a few seconds, still holding out the diversion agreement out in front of him, “nobody wants to see you locked in a detention center, but that’s pretty much guaranteed to happen if you don’t go over this paperwork with Mister Wilson and sign it. Okay? It’ll keep you home, help you with whatever’s going on, and maybe—”

“Is that how it works with kids like me?” 

“Excuse me?”

Kate raises her head slowly, and for the first time, absolute, uncontrolled anger flashes in her eyes. Everything about her, all the fire and energy he admired back during the Killgrave trial, hardens to stone in front of him, her shoulders and jaw clenching. “This is how the system works, isn’t it? A kid from a shitty home lands in jail or a shelter, spends two years on probation, whatever, but you see a rich kid whose parents have a little influence and they sign a ‘I won’t do this again’ agreement?”

“That’s not—”

She snorts at him, the sound bitter and disgusted. “You’re like everyone else,” she snaps, and rips the diversion agreement right out of his grip. “You don’t actually give a shit. Not when it matters.”

“Kate, I don’t—”

“Whatever,” she spits, and within seconds, she’s storming through the glass doors at the end of the hall and disappearing into the elevator. 

Clint stands in the middle of the hallway for a long time after that, staring blankly at the elevators until Judge English’s assistant comes out to ask if he’s okay. He reports in with her, reschedules a few hearings while he’s at it, and then retreats back upstairs. It’s a usual Friday afternoon—Steve and Bucky in court dealing with hearings, Maria and Phil behind closed doors, everybody else working—and Clint wanders the hallways like a ghost before he finally heads to his own office

He digs through the piles of miscellaneous crap on his desk until he finds the dummy _office supply invoices_ folder at the bottom of the stack. The information of Bishop’s five victims is the same as the last time he looked at it, but Clint skims back through, anyway. They’re all graduating seniors, all enrolled at Holy Trinity, all promised scholarships at fancy colleges with stupidly pretentious names. Devan got picked up eight months earlier for underage drinking and Dylan spent the last half his basketball season on the bench for shitty grades, but otherwise, they’re upstanding citizens

He drags out their statements to the cops, rambling and patchy as they are, and starts rereading from the beginning. None of the facts change: Kate showed up to the party late, didn’t drink, flipped out on them, and all hell broke loose after that.

He’s all the way down to Brandon’s affidavit, his fingers in his hair as he squints down at the tiny words, when his office door opens without so much as a knock. “I’m reading your motion this weekend, Darcy,” he says for the thousandth time in the last twenty-four hours.

“Sorry, but I don’t look nearly as good in a pencil skirt.” Clint jerks his head up to glare at Stark, but the guy just raises his hands in mock-surrender. “You weren’t answering your e-mail, and I need to know whether you and Rocky Mountain High are still coming tomorrow or if you’re spending all day and night in bed doing things I’d rather not ever think about you doing.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “Do you and Bruce keep any secrets from one another?”

“One, no, and two, you had that entire conversation less than fifty feet from my head. Even my kid knows about it.” Clint pinches the bridge of his nose, well aware that Tony’s staring him down. The guy even taps his damp foot. “Well?”

“Yes, we’re still coming to your party,” Clint promises, almost sighing to himself. Tony turns to trot away—proving that, for once, he hadn’t just stopped by to be annoying—when Clint blurts, “Hey, lemme ask you something.”

Stark glances back over his shoulder, his eyes narrowing suspiciously. “If this is about you and Aspenglow participating in the unspeakable congress, I don’t—”

“I’m starting to think you care more about my sex life than I do,” Clint cuts him off. Stark grins at him, but he rests his arms on the back of one of the chairs in front of Clint’s desk. “Okay, lemme just—” Clint starts to say, but the words jumble in his mouth. He questions his sanity for a moment, then shakes the cobwebs out of his head and tries again. “You ever get into trouble when you were a kid?” 

“In what sense? I mean, you had a technical genius with an inattentive father and a dead mother, so if you’re asking whether I minded my manners at school, then—”

“Real trouble,” Clint clarifies, and Tony’s hands abruptly stop dancing. His face and shoulders soften. “Maybe not my kind of trouble—”

“You do have the market cornered on attorneys who knock over convenience stores.”

Clint only pauses long enough to flip him off. “I mean the kind of trouble that your folks would’ve wanted to keep you out of no matter the cost.”

Tony frowns, his brow creasing, and for a couple seconds, he just stands there, picking at a hangnail. “You forget about the part where I was orphaned before I finished up my first degree, and I was an early bloomer,” he says finally, shrugging slightly. “But, dead parents aside, Obie spent pretty much my entire downward spiral trying to keep my more titillating screw-ups out of the papers. I hear non-disclosure agreements became our in-house counsel’s bread and butter.”

He falls quiet, his shoulders lifting in a half-hearted shrug, and Clint nods a little. “Okay.”

“Not ‘okay,’” Tony retorts, shaking his head. “I know how your brain works. If you wanted delicious blackmail to protect me from mocking your relationship with Country Roads, you’d just e-mail my husband.”

Clint snorts at him. “You’ll run out of John Denver songs eventually, you know.”

Tony flashes him a grin. “But not _immediately_ ,” he counters, and Clint rolls his eyes. “But because you’re not fishing for blackmail—which is a shame, by the way, because Bruce has some excellent pictures from Dot’s preschool graduation ceremony—”

“Stark.”

He raises his hands. “My point is that you’ve gotta be asking about the inner workings of the rich and fabulous, and if _that’s_ the case: yes.”

Clint frowns. “Yes?” he repeats.

“As in ‘yes, filthy rich people will do anything to keep their kids out of trouble if they think it’s in their best interests.’ And I’m not talking about the kids’ best interests, either.” He shrugs again before he pushes up off the back of the chair. “This is why I co-parent with a guy of more modest means. Keeps me honest.” 

Against his better judgment, Clint laughs a little while he shakes his head. “Or because nobody besides Bruce’d be brave enough to raise a kid with you.”

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other.” Stark winks, coaxing another huff of laughter out of him, and starts backing out of the room. “Seriously, if you plan on skipping out on us, at least text a guy and let him know,” he adds. Clint rolls his eyes again. “I’m not having another weird uneven game of charades because somebody stayed home to screw.”

“For the last time, Natasha had bronchitis.”

“I don’t care what she and Pepper are calling it now, the point stands,” Tony returns, and Clint laughs as he disappears into the hallway.

Focusing on the police reports is pretty hard after that, so Clint abandons them to unlock his computer. He boots up their case file database and runs each all five of the boys’ names through it, but of course, he comes up blank. He even tries switching to last names, too, but one’s a Miller and another’s a Brown, and _those_ names bring up too many results to count.

He’s skimming through the Browns on principle when Darcy sweeps in, her arms full of files. She dumps them in his inbox, and he distractedly nods his thanks. He never glances at her, though, so he misses her disapproving half-glare until she says, “Well, I was going to ask for permission to leave a half-hour early for the Learned Hand Jobs’ strategy meeting, but since you’re ignoring me, I think I’ll just go.”

He jerks his head up from his computer as she crosses her arms over her too-bright yellow t-shirt. He’s eternally grateful that she’s wearing a cardigan to cover up the terrifying picture of the President Obama sex toy on the back. “Sorry, I’m just trying to work out a couple things on the Bishop case,” he says, waving a hand at her. “You can go.”

She frowns at him, glancing down at the mess of papers on his desk. “Like I told you, there’s nothing out there on the victims,” she says. “Steve’s never even filed a half-assed information on any of them. Trust me, because I would’ve found it.”

“I know,” he replies. He starts to turn back to his computer, but then glances back up at Darcy. “Did you search police reports at all?”

“Uh, no,” Darcy replies. “Have you ever tried to use that database? If you don’t have a report number, it’s like searching for a needle in a pile of needles. Pretty much any call made to the police department is logged in there.” She shrugs. “Add in the fact that one misspelling by some rushed officer who didn’t use spell check means that your search is ruined, and—” 

“I get it,” he cuts her off, and she nods. They both end up staring at the jumbled mess of police reports and computer printouts, a couple dozen sheets of paper that, together, paint the picture of five great kids who got attacked by a crazy girl. 

“It sucks,” she finally says, and Clint looks back up at Darcy in time to see her shake her head. “That feeling, you know? The one where the pit of your stomach keeps telling you something’s wrong, but you can’t prove it?” He nods, and she huffs out a breath. “Drove me crazy for weeks until I knew I was right.”

He frowns. “Right about what?”

“Right about you having some kind of crazy going on in your life,” she retorts. He snorts at her; when she smiles back, the warmth never really reaches her eyes. “I’m leaving for trivia now,” she tells him, “and you can’t really stop me.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” he calls after her, and then turns back to the damn computer screen. 

 

==

 

“You give Denver any more thought, boss?” Clint asks on Saturday evening, and Phil stills on the porch swing.

Memorial Day at Tony’s is pretty much like any other holiday, filled with booze, conversation, and grilling disasters. Jasper’d forcibly removed the grill tongs from Tony’s grip after a whole line of Italian sausages’d gone up in flames and banished him to the kitchen to “open up the vats of potato salad or something else you can’t fuck up;” two hours later, Clint’s still convinced that Tony’d dragged Bruce upstairs for some sulky, offended foreplay. But the burgers, hotdogs, and sausages are mostly-eaten now, the recycling bin full of beer and hard cider bottles and the trash nearly overflowing with paper plates. In the far recesses of the yard, a bunch of people are walking Dot through her first game of slow-pitch whiffle ball. Bucky’s up at bat, Dot waiting on the dish towel that’s pretending to be second base (how a five-year-old hit a double, Clint’ll never know). Darcy wets her lips and adjusts her backwards baseball cap before lobbing the ball slow and low over the plate; plastic cracks against plastic, and before Clint can really track it, the ball splashes down in the pool for an in-the-yard home run. Bucky hoots and hollers, Tony and Miles both loudly accuse him of cheating, and Dot crosses home plate for the express purpose of pouncing on Bruce the catcher. 

“He’s not on your team!” Steve laments. Apparently, good sportsmanship doesn’t apply to backyard whiffle ball games. “You don’t celebrate with the people on the _other_ team.”

“Everybody’s on my team!” Dot retorts snottily, and well, who can really argue with that?

The cluster of spectators for the ballgame—Peggy, Natasha, Jane and the baby, Pepper, Jasper—laugh at the teams’ antics for a couple seconds before returning to their conversation, but on the porch swing, Phil stays quiet. He’s spent the last day or so the same way, caught up in his thoughts as he’s wandered around their house and then, around the groups at the party. Clint’d tried to leave him alone to work out whatever’s crawling around in his brain, but every extra hour of silence just meant an extra hour where his stomach churned until it hurt.

He’s not a nosy asshole like Stark or a worry-about-everybody busybody like Steve.

But he’s human, and he wants his guy to trust him enough to talk to him, too.

Phil kicks the swing back into gear and it sways unevenly for a second, only settling into its new momentum when Clint helps it along. Down on the makeshift ball field, Miles hits an easy single and dashes for first base, elbowing first baseman Tony pretty much the whole way there. Phil wets his lips, his eyes on the game. “I had a long talk with Maria on Friday,” he says after a couple seconds.

“I figured,” Clint admits, staring at his empty cup. “She give you her blessing?”

Phil snorts half a laugh, shaking his head. “Only if blessing is defined as _an hour-long lecture on how I’m an idiot_.”

“I can check Urban Dictionary for that, ‘cause I’m pretty sure . . . ” Clint reaches into his pocket for his phone, but Phil beats him to the punch, grabbing his hand and yanking it out of range. He grins right then, the crinkles around his eyes bunching in silent laughter, and for a second, Clint’s overwhelmed by the warmth that floods into his belly. This, he thinks, is what he’ll miss if Phil spends the next six weeks in Denver, these tiny, unexpected moments where he finds himself drowning in how hard he loves the guy next to him.

Phil strokes his wrist before releasing it, and Clint finally abandons his red cup to stretch his arm along the back of the swing. Phil rolls his eyes, good-natured and long-suffering all at once, but he inches closer anyway. They swing together like that for a couple seconds, watching the baseball teams switch positions.

Finally, Phil sighs. “She didn’t tell me to stay, either.” His voice is soft, almost like it’s caught in the back of his throat; his eyes search Clint’s face. Clint tries to keep his face neutral even as his stomach twists into a knot. “She talked a lot about loyalty and our felony backlog—never mind about how much she hates Ken—but in the end, she didn’t tell me to stay.”

Clint nods, glancing back out into the yard. “She tell you to go, then?” he asks. His voice feels shaky. 

“No, she told me to do the usual.”

“Which is?”

“Exactly what I want to do.” 

Phil grins a little, as shitty and full of trouble as the ones his nephews flash just before they start some sort of family drama, and Clint abandons all his self-control to lean over and kiss him. He only means to catch the corner of his mouth and steal a half-second peck, but then Phil tips his head at the last second and all bets are off. Clint sighs, his hand drifting into the soft hair at the nape of Phil’s neck; Phil’s own hand lands on Clint’s thigh, his fingers pressing solidly into his skin through his jeans. He licks his way into Clint’s mouth, a silent request that Clint immediately honors, and—

“Are you actually defiling my porch swing?” Tony demands from no more than five feet away, and Clint laughs as he and Phil break apart. Stark rests his hands on his hips and glares at the both of them. “That swing is meant for long summertime conversations while sipping iced tea and supervising pool parties, not—that.”

He flaps a hand at them, and Phil rolls his eyes. “It’s called ‘kissing.’ I assume you’re familiar with it.”

“Sorry, is that what you two were trying to do? Because from here, it mostly looked like two vultures fighting over a strip of—”

“Because watching you make out with Bruce is always a delight,” Pepper chides nearby, and Clint twists to find that she’s standing at the drink table, a cup of so-called psychosomatic sangria in her hand. She’s wearing cut-off shorts and a thin beige sweater that shows off one of her shoulders; not for the first time, Clint thinks that Natasha’s a lucky woman. 

“Uh, I’m sorry,” Tony retorts, wiggling a finger in her direction, “did you just compare my healthy and not-at-all creepy relationship to Barton and Country Roads?”

“We’re going to need to agree to disagree on the meaning of healthy,” Phil comments, and Pepper laughs as he pushes up off the swing. He offers Clint a hand up, but Clint sits there for a couple seconds, just letting his gaze wander along his whole body. He’s in jeans and a black t-shirt that stretches across his shoulders, and his eyes are steady and dark, full of the kind of promise that makes Clint’s heart race. 

Clint grabs his hand, and Phil hauls him up and close, their bodies pressing together long enough that Stark rolls his eyes. Clint smiles innocently, sliding his hand in Phil’s back pocket like a horny teenager. “We’re going to go have sex, now,” he reports.

“I hate everything about you both,” Tony declares, but Clint catches the grin that sparks across his face as he waves them off.

They drive home in the late-May dusk, the sky bursting with purple and pink, but Clint spends most of his time studying the lines of Phil’s body instead of the sunset. They slam the car doors a little too hard, and Phil fumbles his keys on the front stoop; once they’re inside, Phil shoves Clint into the nearest wall and kisses the breath out of him while the screen door bangs shut behind them. The lazy pace they’d set on Stark’s swing is immediately replaced by real hunger, and when Clint slips his hands under Phil’s t-shirt and rakes fingers over his skin, Phil rewards him with a needy groan. Phil retaliates by rutting hard against the front of Clint’s hip, proving exactly how little effect the car ride had on his _want_ , and they stumble to the bedroom like that: pushing and pulling the whole way, their clothes lost in the hallway as teeth ghost against pulse points.

The minutes fly and drag simultaneously, as erratic and fragmented as the two of them as they try to touch and taste every inch of each other’s skin. Phil kisses a hot trail down Clint’s chest and stomach while Clint drags fingers through his hair and tries not to buck right off the bed; Phil grunts when Clint pins him down, straddling his hips to kiss him hard and messy. Clint claws at the sheets as Phil whispers promises—soon and can’t wait, _need you_ and beautiful—against his neck, and by the time Phil’s peeling him apart, Clint swears he’s already about to come undone. 

They take their time, letting every touch linger and every moment stretch endlessly into the next until Clint’s rolling Phil over and curling fingers against his chest. He feels like he’s on fire from the inside out, lava pooling in his belly and racing through his veins, every breath harder than the last. Phil grips his hips hard enough to bruise as they rock together, and suddenly, Clint’s gasps morph into clumsy words that tumble helplessly out of his mouth; he repeats Phil’s name like a mantra, broken only by noises like whimpers and pleas for more. Phil encourages every trembling syllable, spurring him on, and when he palms Clint roughly in the middle of Clint’s helpless keening, Clint unravels on his wrist and stomach.

Phil follows him over the edge, grunting out words that might be nonsense but also might also include a breathless _I love you_ , and then they collapse together on the mattress, boneless and sticky. Clint presses his face into the side of Phil’s arm, working to regain his breath and his brain, but he feels overflowing and hollow all at once.

After a good fifteen or twenty minutes, Phil brushes a kiss against his hairline and nudges him away, offering a hand once he rolls out of their rumpled sheets. They stumble together into the bathroom, sharing lazy kisses in the doorway, on the rug, and under the warm spray of the shower. If Clint tells Phil he loves him more than once, well, he can blame the sex for that; if Phil smiles brightly enough to hang a couple stars, well, that’s okay, too.

They dry off before climbing back into bed and tangling around one another, all endless planes of bare limbs and slowly-stroking fingers. Clint tries to memorize every contour of Phil’s face in the half-light of their bedroom, to catalogue every fine line and tiny freckle. He thinks for a few seconds that his whole life’s written in the way Phil smiles at him, but of course, he can’t figure out how to say it.

Instead, he says, “If you wanna go to Denver, you should.” Phil draws back immediately, surprise written all over his face, but Clint just shakes his head. “Cases like this don’t come around every day, and you know how it works in our business. You turn down an opportunity like this, and people don’t offer them to you again.”

Phil rolls his lips together. He nods after a couple seconds, but it’s halting and hesitant. His fingers stroke along Clint’s stomach. “You know I don’t relish the idea of being five hours away, right?” he asks softly, watching his hand instead of Clint’s face. “Because every time I list out the pros and cons in my head, I end up triple-underlining the one where I spend six weeks away from you.”

“Yeah, but it’s six weeks, not six years.” Phil glances up at him, eyebrows raised, and Clint sighs. “Okay, six weeks is a fucking long time,” he admits, “but we’ve got Skype, texts, and e-mails. You’ll come home on some of the weekends.”

“Every weekend,” Phil corrects.

“See? Even better.” Phil snorts and rolls his eyes, so Clint elbows him lightly in the ribs. “I’ll miss you in ways you’re not supposed to miss a guy until you’ve been married for ten years, but that’s not a good reason for turning down this job.”

The corner of Phil’s mouth kicks up in a tiny smile. “I didn’t know you couldn’t miss your partner until after you’re married,” he comments quietly. 

Clint shrugs. “You _can_ , just not the way I’ll miss you.”

“And what way is that, exactly?”

He holds Phil’s eyes for a couple seconds, totally caught up in the warmth there, but he ends up just shaking his head again. He’s not sure how to define the loneliness that gnaws at him when he thinks of six weeks without Phil, so he presses a kiss against Phil’s shoulder and rests his cheek there. 

“It’s that way where I miss you a lot,” he finally answers.

Phil chuckles. “That’s very specific.”

“What can I say? I’m a specific kinda guy,” he jokes, and Phil kisses his hairline before they fall into a comfortable silence.

 

==

 

They spend the whole rest of the long weekend like normal, except with a lot more grabby, urgent sex. Clint wanders in from weeding Phil’s sad little flowerbeds only to be forced against a wall and stripped out of his shorts (not that he’s complaining); Phil’s allowed to unpack their groceries before Clint drags him down onto the couch and unbuttons his fly. They save water by showering together—not that they necessarily end those showers _clean_ —and burn dinner because they’re swapping needy little kisses in the kitchen.

Clint knows it’s all some kind of extended apology for the plane ticket Phil books Sunday morning, but he keeps that thought to himself, helping Phil sort through his suits and iron a bunch of freshly-washed dress shirts.

“I’d rather not trust a hotel iron if I can avoid it,” Phil admits Monday night during the last batch of ironing, and Clint glances up from the book he’s pretending to read. He’s mostly spent the last half-hour studying the line of Phil’s back in his undershirt and imagining his teeth grazing against his shoulder blades. He shakes the cobwebs out of his head, and Phil smiles. “Are you even listening?”

“When I’m not imagining you naked, sure,” Clint replies, and Phil throws a wrinkled shirt at his face.

Phil’s plane’s scheduled to leave Tuesday night, allowing him exactly one day to hand off all his cases to different attorneys, and Clint works pretty hard to keep his distance. His morning docket’s light thanks to the holiday—he’ll probably pay for that next week—but he lingers outside of Judge English’s courtroom anyway, reviewing files on a bench than heading back upstairs. 

He’s scribbling down a couple notes about an upcoming bench trial, pen cap clenched between his teeth, when somebody drops a bunch of files next to him. “You hear from Wade about the diversion agreement yet?” he asks without looking up.

“That’s more a question for Darcy than for me.” 

He raises his head in surprise, the pen cap nearly cracking between his teeth, and Natasha rolls her eyes as she sits down next to him. She crosses her legs neatly, her own files on her lap. When she tries to meet his eyes, he turns back to his notes. 

“Thanks for the files,” he says dully.

“You’re welcome,” she replies, and folds her hands on top of her portfolio. 

He tries to write down a few more questions, but the longer he sits there, the more he can feel her eyes burning a hole in the side of his skull. He taps his pen on the legal pad a couple times before he shoves the cap back on it and demands, “What?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re not on the docket ‘til this afternoon, and I left those files for Darcy.” She shrugs, an easy lift of her shoulders, and he feels his jaw tense as he narrows his eyes. “Are you checking up on me?”

“That would imply I’m worried about you,” she returns evenly. He rolls his eyes and forces himself to turn back to his notes, but the words suddenly look like illegible chicken scratch. “You don’t need to pretend like you won’t miss him,” she presses after a couple seconds. “Everyone who matters already assumes you will. Sulking down here just proves them—and you—right.”

“I’m not sulking,” he retorts. When he glances at her, she raises an eyebrow. “It’s a lot easier to work down here than get distracted upstairs.” Convincing as he thinks he sounds, the catch in the back of his throat betrays him. He sighs. “I go upstairs between hearings, I’m gonna follow him around like our cat when she’s hungry,” he says, and Natasha’s lips twitch into a smile. “He’s meeting with Steve and Bucky about handling some of his active cases, then he’s passing off all the intern supervision stuff to Bruce, and that’s before lunch. Last thing he needs is me getting in the way.”

“But you don’t mind if he’s left thinking about how you spent all day avoiding him when you drop him at the airport eight hours from now?” Clint twists his pen cap idly, shaking his head a little. “The first week is going to be the hardest. Don’t make it worse by falling back into your old habits and running away from him.”

He snorts a tiny laugh. “And you know this from experience?”

“Pepper’s not the first person I’ve ever dated,” she replies smoothly. She pats him on the knee before she slides off the bench. She smoothes her skirt over her hips, then shoots him a warning look. “He’s going to miss you too, you know.”

He glances back down at his legal pad. “I know,” he admits, and listens to her walk away.

Stark reserves an enormous table at the wings place a couple blocks from the judicial complex, announcing when they arrive that Bruce is picking up the tab for all their lunches. Bruce falters for a second, almost missing his chair. Tony grins as he drops into the seat next to him.

“You realize I’m going to pay with the card for your bank account, yes?” Bruce asks.

“ _Mi dinero es su dinero_ ,” Tony replies lightly, and then promptly orders one of every appetizer and “a metric crap load of extra napkins.”

Phil mostly pretends he’s not the reluctant guest of honor, sitting comfortably between Clint and Steve and listening to all the conversations around him. The stories are either about family or work, but every damn one of them is funny: Bucky informs them all about Dot’s decision to remove the training wheels from her big girl bike—“I didn’t teach her to use a screwdriver, but I’m proud anyway!” Tony announces from halfway down the table; Maria recounts the dozen messages from a _pro se_ defendant she’d discovered on her voicemail that morning; Pepper complains about her hot yoga instructor while Natasha hides a laugh behind her soda. Thor passes around the latest batch of cell phone pictures of Astrid, Darcy attempts to trump him with her _own_ cell phone pictures of the kid, and then Tony defeats them all with a series of shots he dubs “when Ganke and Miles fell asleep on their Legos.” 

They’re mostly through with their lunches of hot wings and various fried vegetables when Tony hauls himself to his feet and raises his glass of Mountain Dew. Bucky rolls his eyes, and down at the end of the table, Maria shakes her head while Pepper rubs her temple. 

“I’ll make this short and sweet, mostly because doing otherwise will land me in the proverbial dog house with the guy who shares my bed,” he declares, and Bruce manages to keep a straight face as he sighs. “But I wanted to stand up and say a very heartfelt temporary good riddance to Coulson, as he leaves us tonight to go suck up to a bunch of shitty federal prosecutors who have _nothing_ on this office.”

At Clint’s side, Phil works very hard to hide his little grin. He rolls his lips together, but his laugh lines crinkle anyway. “I will still be home on weekends, you know,” he comments, genuine warmth sneaking into his tone. 

“As long as you’re not having sex in Barton’s office, I don’t care where you are,” Tony retorts. He leads them in a weird little toast after that, but Clint mostly ignores it; after all, if he has to pick between watching Phil’s smile broaden and listening to Stark flex his vocal courts, the choice is pretty obvious.

They crowd back onto the sidewalk once Bruce’s paid for lunch (with Stark’s card, not that anybody’s surprised), clumping into little groups and carrying on with the conversations they’d started in the restaurant. Phil hangs back, mostly thanking folks for throwing him an impromptu “we’ll miss you” lunch, and Clint looms at his shoulder. He smiles at everybody who passes, from Maria right down the couple interns who’d tagged along, and then falls into step at Phil’s shoulder for the walk back to work. 

They’re stopped at a crosswalk when Phil slides his hand into Clint’s and tangles their fingers together. Clint starts a little, but Phil just smiles. For a split-second, Clint’s flooded so completely with warmth and _need_ that he nearly drops to his knees and begs Phil to stay; the haze clears slowly, like smoke dissipating after somebody blows out a candle.

They’re so busy staring at one another on the street corner that they don’t realize the light’s changed until it the crosswalk indicator starts beeping its stupid fifteen-second warning. Phil shakes his head and leads Clint across the street, still holding on.

It’s only after they step into the shadow of the judicial complex that Clint thinks to say, “Six weeks isn’t too long.” Every word sounds like a lie.

Next to him, Phil smiles. “Except when it is,” he replies quietly, and squeezes Clint’s hand.

 

==

 

Clint drops Phil off at the airport about an hour before his plane takes off, circling back home the long way in Phil’s empty car. He pretends he’s not hyper-aware of every plane-shaped blotch of black in the sky as he drives, but he knows that’s a lie. He stops off at a gas station to fill up and grab a cup of coffee, swings by Target to grab Sandy some cat food, and eventually puts himself out of his misery and pulls into the driveway of their empty house.

He kicks off his shoes before he decides to spend the night like an asshole bachelor. He strips down to his boxers and a t-shirt, turns up the volume on ESPN, and orders Chinese for dinner. He eats in front of the TV, Sandy begging the whole damn time; when he’s finished, he shoves the leftovers in the fridge and starts working through the day’s neglected e-mails. He tosses back and forth suggested hearing times with Heimdall, lists out a bunch of simple tasks for Darcy to pass off on one of the other interns, and reviews a draft motion that she’d sent him a week earlier. Wade finally shoots him an e-mail around the time some baseball game starts, and he and Clint hash out a time to finish up the damn diversion agreement.

_fyi shes pissed abt it nd i dont no y_ , Wade types at one point.

Clint swigs his beer before replying, _you’re her lawyer—you figure it out_ , and he laughs when Wade’s retort consists of rough, ASCII approximations of both a middle finger and a dick.

Phil calls when he lands, and they chat while he figures out his way through the “sea of moving walkways—what were the architects thinking?” and down to the rental car desk. There’s a lot of dead air between them, though, awkward pauses they struggle to fill in with words.

Problem is, saying goodbye’s even worse.

Clint cleans up his work mess and heads to bed a little after eleven. He brushes his teeth before he realizes that he’s not checked Sandy’s water; he’s almost in bed before he remembers he needs to set setting the coffee pot timer and start the dishwasher. They’re all tasks he usually leaves to Phil, little aspects of their routine that feel like individual rubber band snaps of loneliness, He stands in the kitchen for the first ten seconds after the dishwasher clicks on, listening to it fill.

Phil’s flying home for the weekend on Saturday morning, he reminds himself. Three days is nothing. 

He’s almost back to the bedroom before he thinks to lock the front door, and he swears to himself as he backtracks. Sandy weaves between his ankles as she follows him down the dark hallway; he nearly trips on her twice, and each time, she stares up at him like she’s confused about why he’s stopped walking. He flips the deadbolt, pausing for a minute to look out on their quiet, empty street.

It’s only as he’s twisting to head back to bed that he notices a car without its headlights on slowly rolling down the road, a black shadow layered on more black as it drifts past the house. Clint convinces himself that it’s just a trick of the light and rubs his eyes for a second.

When he drops his hand, the street’s still and silent, just like every other night.

“Great, now you’re the sad, lonely, _hallucinating_ guy,” he mumbles to himself, and scoops up the cat on his way to the bedroom.


	8. Unanswered Questions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, Clint tries to unravel Kate Bishop’s mysteries and to not miss Phil. Turns out, he fails at both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My beta-readers, Jen and saranoh, continue to be wonderful. I continue to mess with the chapter after they've read it, filling it with egregious errors. I am sorry in advance.

“You are preaching about the love of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to the choir, Pastor Barton, and I am still telling you that those are the exact words that came out of her pretty little pink mouth.” Wade lifts his enormous glass of beer from the table, foam sloshing over the edge, and helps himself to a greedy sip before gesturing with it. “She said I can even triple her community service time if that’s what it takes to keep her from having to write apology letters to her victims. Her exact words included three very exciting uses of the word ‘fuck’ and something about humane society stalls.”

Across the stupid high-top table Wade insisted on sitting at, Clint raises an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Hand to the God who you are still preaching about, that’s what she said,” Wade replies, and Clint sighs. 

The High Bar is filled with what Wade swears up and down is its normal Wednesday night crowd, a bunch of rowdy twenty-somethings in tight pants, button-down plaid shirts, and weird little knit caps that don’t fit with the June weather. Clint’d spent the first three minutes after he’d arrived just standing in the entryway and feeling _old_. Two different waiters’d stopped to ask whether he was meeting somebody, and one girl—a patron, by the looks of her incredibly short shorts—commented that she _wished her dad dressed as good as you, new guy_.

Clint’d almost walked out, but then Wade’d showed up and dragged him to one of the high-top tables over by the acoustic stage. No, really, that’s the label on the brown paper banner that hangs above it, and Clint swears that the second some girl in a flowered dress hops up to sing, he’s _leaving_.

Wade, on the other hand, sucks wonton sauce off his thumb and returns to the diversion agreement he’d dragged out of his bag once they’d ordered food and drinks.

Clint rubs his face and scrolls through the open document on his laptop. He’d balked at Wade’s suggestion that they hash out the details of Kate Bishop’s demands—Wade’s words, sure, but for once, totally accurate—over beers and shitty bar food. After waking up alone on Wednesday and dragging himself through the morning without a shirtless Phil looming behind him in the bathroom and offering him coffee, all he’d wanted to do was drown himself in work: the diversion agreement first, followed by reviewing all his files for Friday docket, annotating his witness interviews for a couple upcoming trials, and editing the final draft of a motion Darcy’d written up for him. He’d figured that if he worked straight through ‘til his usual Wednesday night booze break with Natasha and Bruce, he might totally forget that Phil’d left for Denver.

But Phil’d texted him a half-dozen times throughout the morning, mundane little messages that’d accidentally lifted his spirits every time.

At lunch, Bruce’d cancelled their standing Wednesday night plans. “Tony’s in full seclusion mode until he’s finished slogging through the transcripts that just came in,” he’d explained, dragging fingers through his hair. “He’s staying until at least nine, so I think Miles and I are going to bring him dinner.”

Clint’d cracked a smile. “For his sake, or the kid’s?” 

Bruce’d snorted slightly, the shadow of a laugh. “Mostly my own,” he’d admitted, and speared another chunk of broccoli out of his tray of Chinese food.

And then, at about three in the afternoon, Wade’d called, his greeting rushed and frantic enough that Clint’d groaned and threatened, “If this is about a sex thing, I swear to—”

“No sex,” Wade’d interrupted breathlessly. “I wish it _was_ sex. Sex would be completely better than phone call number six with the creepy little princess who for some reason is also my client. Do you know she likes archery? Because she told me that, I think as a threat, and now I—” 

Clint’d sighed. “Wade.”

“Yeah?”

“English.”

If it hadn’t been for Wade’s continued heavy breathing, Clint would’ve assumed that the line’d gone dead. “The judge?” Wade’d finally asked.

Clint’d pulled off his glasses for the express purpose of rubbing the bridge of his nose. “No,” he’d answered, “the language. As in: explain to me what the fuck you’re saying, but in English this time.”

“Oh.”

Now, with the hipsters slowly closing in on them, Clint finally thinks he understood Wade’s frantic rambling about Kate Bishop the part-time she-devil. (Wade’s words, not Clint’s.) “Writing an apology to the victim’s pretty standard for these kind of agreements,” he says, glancing up at Wade. “I get that she doesn’t wanna do it, but I don’t know if I can cut it, either.”

“And I told her that. Twice. I even tried it in sign language, but I’ve only really learned the super-basics so far, so it got pretty awkward pretty fast.” Wade starts demonstrating, his hands flying around, and Clint narrows his eyes ‘til he stops. “We danced around the victim stuff for a good hour, Clint—over three different phone calls, because apparently big bad Daddy Bishop’s not exactly a fan of his pretty little daughter hanging out with a glorious one-balled wonder like myself—”

“Pretty sure that’s _not_ Bishop’s problem,” Clint mutters.

“—but every time, she clams up and changes the subject.” He double-dips a celery stick into the little tub of ranch and sighs. “Closest I came was when she said that she wouldn’t hang out with her victims if it’d save the universe from a _Divergent_ -style dystopian future, whatever that actually means.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “It’s a book,” he explains, and Wade stops chewing to squint at him. He shrugs. “One of Jane’s friends picked it for book club a couple months ago. It’s not actually that bad.”

“I’m not supposed to find the fact that you’re a tough, manly guy who’s not afraid to admit he’s in a book club sexy, right?” Wade asks. Clint huffs a breath and reaches for his beer, but not before Wade waggles a finger _and_ both his eyebrows in his general direction. “Because I’m in a committed relationship and you’re in a committed relationship and we both like it that way, but _wow_ , that’s kind of sexy.”

Clint bites down on his smile and shakes his head. “Remind me why I hang out with you again?” 

“Tonight, it’s because you owe me massive amounts of beer for suffering through this terrifying case, thank you very much,” Wade returns, and when he toasts the air in front of him, Clint finally gives in and laughs. 

They spend what feels like months slogging through the stupid diversion agreement, adding and subtracting paragraphs ‘til Clint starts to wonder if any of his rough draft’s even left in the Word file. He grudgingly deletes the part about apology letters but ups the community service requirement by sixty hours; they add in the requirement that Kate not miss any therapy sessions and that she attend a six-week “positive choices” program.

“You know that’s going to go over like a fart at a little kid’s dance recital, right?” Wade asks. He swirls the last of his beer around in the bottom of his glasss. “Not a thing I know from experience, just a thing I can guess after, you know, six phone calls with my terrifying and very angry teenage client.”

“Your terrifying and angry teenage client needs to figure out that she’s not holding all the cards.” Wade nods a little, swigging the rest of his beer, but Clint watches him for a couple seconds too long. A half-second staring contest turns to five and ten before he sighs. “You know it’s fishy, right?”

“What is?” 

“This whole ordeal.” Wade blinks at him, and Clint rolls his eyes. “Your client, this crime, her crazy resentment toward the diversion agreement—”

“Really, it was mostly toward the apology letters.”

“And that, too.” Wade frowns, and Clint shakes his head before he reaches for his beer. “You really don’t think there’s anything weird between her and these victims?” he presses. “Five boys, no records, no real provocation at the party, and she still kicks the shit out of them? That’s not a red flag for you?”

“There’s a difference between a red flag and an actual relevant thing that I can deal with as her attorney, you know,” Wade replies. He shrugs and steals a carrot from the bottom of their empty wing basket. He drags it through the ranch, drawing little buffalo-tinged shapes in the sauce. “Do I think the whole thing smacks of the crazy uncle pouring poison in Hamlet’s dad’s ear? Yeah, okay, sure. But here’s the first thing I learned back when I started at legal aid: the weird stuff’s almost always a red herring.” He tips his head to one side. “Actually, that makes a lot of sense. It smells fishy, maybe even _is_ fishy, but a herring is a fish so it probably does that.”

Clint scrubs a hand over his face. “I mean—”

Wade abandons his carrot to raise his hand. “No, I get what you mean,” he says, and Clint presses his lips into a tight line. “But if I chase every single rainbow looking for a pot of gold, I end up losing a ton of time and gaining exactly no gold. If anything, I probably end up with _negative_ gold because, I mean, I’m paying the money to search for the gold I don’t have and then not finding any.”

Clint snorts half a laugh at him and he reaches for his plate. There’s half a wonton _thing_ on it, plus some congealed queso and the skeleton of buffalo wing, so he opts for the wonton. It’s only after he bites down that Wade asks, “What’s your real deal?”

When he glances across the table, Clint discovers that Wade’s peering at him carefully. He swallows without tasting anything besides fryer grease. “What?”

“Your bed buddy’s off admiring really tall chunks of rock and dirt while he solves other people’s mysteries—which sucks, by the way—and if that was the only thing that seems to be crawling under your skin and making you extra weird, I’d get that.” Clint rolls his eyes and grabs his beer, but Wade keeps staring. “But I’ve defended enough cases on the other side of the courtroom to know that something besides your lack of buggery is bugging you.”

Clint almost chokes on his mouthful of beer. “Buggery?”

Wade grins. “British slang for hot and sticky butts—”

“I know what it means, Wade,” Clint interrupts, and Wade rewards him with an even brighter grin. He sighs and sets his beer back down on the table. He rocks it from side to side, the foam clinging to the glass. “It’s like there’s a piece missing,” he finally answers.

“A piece of what?”

“The puzzle?” Wade frowns at him, and he huffs out a laugh. “I know how stupid that sounds,” he admits, “and with the whole diversion thing, it doesn’t even matter. But I don’t like leaving a case looking like Swiss cheese, you know? I don’t want something sneaking through the holes and biting me in the ass.”

Wade nods a little, his elbows resting on the table. “Word of advice from somebody who doesn’t _just_ do traffic cases—which, by the way and no disrespect, tend not to explode into something sticky and disgusting if you don’t treat them nice?”

Clint tries on a tiny grin. “Sure.”

“Every case has some holes you can’t plug. Getting used to that is both literally and figuratively half the big bad battle.”

They don’t talk much after that except to fight over who’ll handle the check—Clint wins, but only because the evening crowd’s winding down and their waiter glares at them when Wade asks her about splitting the total in some complicated way. The night’s breezy and comfortable when they step outside, and Clint spends a minute enjoying the cool June air. 

Then, Wade knocks their shoulders together. “On a scale of one to ten, it’s pretty much a six-thousand-and-five, right?” he asks. Clint frowns at him, and he rolls his eyes. “Coulson running off and temporarily defecting to the feds. Don’t tell me you already forgot about how your only companion tonight’s gonna be your right ha—”

“How’d you find out about that, anyway?” 

“Darcy.” Clint rolls his eyes as they walk through the parking lot together, Wade’s elbow accidentally impacting his, but of course, all he can think about is Phil. He tries to reason with himself about it—they’re adults and capable of spending a night apart, you know?—but the tight feeling reminds him about how empty and quiet the house feels. 

Once during Wednesday night beer time, Bruce admitted how he never really sleeps right when Tony’s away for oral arguments. Clint figures he can justify missing his boyfriend of almost a year if Bruce can miss a guy he married in _December_.

“Since we met, we’ve never really been apart,” Clint says as they approach Wade’s battered Geo Metro, and Wade twists around to look at him. He shrugs. “We fought a couple times, and it’s not like we slept together every night, but most the time, he’s right _there_.” 

“The quieter the house, the louder your brain?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Yeah,” Wade echoes, and he squeezes Clint’s arm in an almost too-familiar way before he unlocks his car and climbs in.

Clint can hear Sandy’s crying through the front door once he shows up home, and the little brat scales his pant leg the second he sets foot inside. He untangles himself from his bag and picks her up, letting her rub under his chin and nuzzle his neck as he wanders through the house. It’s dark and quiet, like he expects, but the cat purrs like a racecar engine. She keeps it up after he refills her food and water, too, and follows when he heads into the bedroom to change.

“I thought you were hungry,” he tells her, and she mews at him as he tugs on his sweatpants. She trails him from room to room until he finally sits down five feet from her stupid kibble bowl so she’ll actually eat.

He touches her on the back, and she arches her little gray body into his touch. “Yeah,” he says once she starts purring again, “I think it’s weird he’s not home, too.”

He’s still stroking her absently, his head lolling back against the utensil drawer and his eyes falling slowly closed, when his cell phone starts vibrating on the counter. Sandy abruptly stops eating when he reaches for it, almost like she’s afraid he’ll bolt out of the room. He rolls his eyes at her. “You’re broken.”

He can feel his grin the second he checks the caller ID. “Hey, boss, our cat’s broken.”

“I suppose that’s the price I pay for leaving you two alone for a couple days,” Phil replies dryly, and Clint lets laughter bubble out of his chest almost like a prolonged sigh of relief. Phil chuckles, too, warm and fond on the other end of the phone; for a second, all Clint wants is to reach through to the other end and pull him home. “I’ll take it the house is still standing, though?”

“So far,” Clint answers. “I mean, we had a minor fire—”

“I’d expect nothing less.”

“—but otherwise, we’re good.” Phil chuckles again, but Clint knows him well enough to hear the exhaustion that hides under it. In the background, he hears something that could be either the television or a conversation, and he frowns. “Please tell me you’re not still at work.”

“Lucky for me, I’ve been back in the hotel for a whole forty-five minutes,” Phil replies. Without the laughter behind his voice, he sounds ragged and half-distracted. Clint pictures him stretched out on a big bed with bland sheets, the nightly news droning in the background while he reviews files and documents. “I spent all day in and out of meetings that existed mostly to catch me up on the case,” he says, “but I still feel like I’m weeks behind the rest of Ken’s team. And now, it’s not even ten and I can’t keep my eyes open.”

Clint imagines Phil falling asleep on a stack of files, glasses on. He smiles. “You want me to send your Keurig out there?” 

“I’d rather have you.” The admission ties Clint’s stomach in knots, but Phil just sighs. “Sleeping in a strange bed is bad enough without it being empty, too.”

“You usually just bitch that I kick the covers everywhere,” Clint points out.

“Better than waking up to readjust them and realizing they’ve never budged,” Phil counters, and the spike of loneliness threatens swallow Clint whole.

They talk for another fifteen minutes before Phil loses out to a long string of yawns and they’re forced into reluctant goodnights. Clint locks up the house, Sandy on his heels; when he crawls into bed, the damn cat climbs up next to him and tucks her face against his palm. He scratches her behind the ears, her purr drowning out the silence.

He’s half-asleep when he thinks to say, “I don’t like this any more than you do, cat.”

Sandy nuzzles her nose into the space between his fingers as an answer, and that’s how they fall asleep.

 

==

 

“So, there’s some kind of mouthy kid here for you,” Darcy says, and Clint drags his eyes away from his computer for the first time in the last hour or so.

It’s barely after five in the afternoon on Friday, not that you’re able to tell just from the look of Clint’s office. The lazy summer sun stretches its long fingers in through the window, casting gold rays onto every surface and lighting the place up like noon on the summer solstice. Clint’d switched off the overhead lights before docket and then kept them that way after, contenting himself to sit in the summer glare and plod his way through file notes and amended tickets.

He’s working on the second-to-last of the tickets, a reckless driving charge he pled down to plain, old-fashioned speeding, but he mostly wants to head home for the weekend. But he also wants a totally free weekend, one where there’re no unaltered tickets or half-finished motions looming overhead. 

He pretends, at least for his own sake, that he’s not clearing off his plate _just_ for Phil coming home.

He’s lying, but nobody else needs to know that.

He rubs his thumb and forefinger over the crease in his brow—he wonders for a second whether that’s a sign he’s spent too much of his day frowning—and glances up at Darcy. She’s changed into jeans and her trivia t-shirt, arms folded under her breasts. “I don’t have all day, you know,” she chides, and he rolls his eyes at her. “Tonight’s the second-to-last match of the season, and they need me if we’re going to blow the _Bugle_ out of the water.”

“You _want_ to beat your boyfriend’s team?”

“Since we bet a wide variety of dinners, movies, and sex acts on who wins and by how much, _yeah_ ,” she retorts. “But seriously, reception’s gone for the day, and when I sent Pepper out to run interference, the kid said she’ll only talk to you. Something about a diversion agreement, I don’t know.”

Clint resists the urge to groan and drags a hand across his face. He feels two-day-old stubble there and adds _shave_ to his mental list of pre-Phil tasks. “Lemme guess,” he finally says as Darcy quirks an eyebrow at him. “About sixteen, dark hair, movie-star sunglasses, and a bad attitude?”

“Got it in one,” she replies. After he grabs his suit jacket—hey, he figures if he looks like a prosecutor, maybe the kid’ll finally count him as one—he catches Darcy frowning at him. 

“You want me to stick around?” she asks as he shrugs into his jacket. “I can miss the first couple questions without—”

“I think I can handle a sixteen-year-old girl,” Clint responds. She nods half-heartedly. “Good luck winning your dinner-movie-sex combo pack.”

“I’ll be sure to report back,” she remarks, but Clint notices the way she lingers in the doorway for a couple seconds too long—and how slowly she heads toward the back stairwell.

The district attorney’s office as a whole is pretty empty as Clint heads out to reception, most of the offices are open and dark. Clint peers into each of them for a couple seconds, inventorying the lives of the people he works with: the spare chair in Bruce’s office is covered in files, bankers boxes of transcripts are stacked in front of Stark’s desk like buttresses on a fortress, Steve’s hung a tissue paper stained glass _thing_ from Dot in his window. Phil’s office feels the quietest and emptiest of all of them, his desk clear of files and everything tucked away. But Clint catches the silver corner of his one framed picture hidden just behind his computer monitor, and that chases the weird pang of longing away in record time.

Phil comes home in the morning, he reminds himself, and heads out into reception.

“You can’t keep hunting me down like this,” he says as soon as he’s through the secure door, and Kate Bishop leaps to her feet so quickly that she almost topples her chair. The dog-eared copy of _People_ featuring Beyoncé crashes to the carpet at her feet. Clint sighs. “I’m the _prosecutor_ ,” he reminds her after a few too-long beats of silence, “and that means—”

“That you get free rein to creep on people?” Kate retorts. His mouth snaps shut as she picks up the dropped magazine and drops it onto the table with old issues of _Better Homes and Gardens_ and _Parenting_. “Is that what prosecutors do, sneak up on unsuspecting—”

“I didn’t sneak up on you,” Clint cuts her off. She rolls her eyes and flips her hair over her shoulders. It’s loose today, a messy collection of unkempt waves. He imagines her swimming in the ocean—not that they’re anywhere near an ocean—before slithering into her leggings and tank top and materializing in the office. “But for the record, if you keep showing up here and demanding to see me, I could get in trouble.”

“Right, because the prosecutorial police are going to show up and haul you off to jail for talking to a teenager,” Kate retorts snidely, and Clint grits his teeth. He tries to keep it subtle, less a flinch than just a little twitch of his lips, but the kid stops halfway to picking up her enormous canvas bag and narrows her eyes at him. “Have you been hauled off to prosecutor jail before?” she asks.

He snorts at her. “Yeah, ‘cause that’s a real thing.”

“And because _that’s_ an answer,” she counters. She rests a hand on one jutting hip. Clint considers turning on his heel and leaving her to stew alone in reception, but he thinks she might throw a tantrum if he does. The last thing he needs is security escorting her out—and then doubling back for an explanation. 

When she keeps staring, he rolls his eyes. “Did you need something?” he asks.

She huffs at him and finally leans down to pick up her bag. “I have my thing,” she says as she starts rooting around in the bottomless pit of lavender-striped canvas.

“Your thing?”

“The final copy of my diversion thing,” she clarifies, and Clint can’t help his little grin. There’s something kinda funny about her when she’s not in court, like all the faking falls away and he can catch glimpses of the girl he talked to all those months ago. She swears under her breath before she finds the papers in the bottom of her bag. 

She smooths them against her stomach before holding out a hand. “Gimme a pen.”

He blinks at her. “Excuse me?”

“I picked it up from Wilson’s office but I haven’t signed it yet. I thought maybe you’d want to make sure I didn’t cheat.”

“I don’t know how you’d cheat your signature,” Clint points out, but she just wiggles her fingers impatiently. He punches the access code to step back into the office and steal a ballpoint off the reception desk. “I know five-year-olds with more patience,” he says as he hands it over.

She flips to the last page and presses the agreement up against the wall. “I thought you didn’t have kids.”

“I don’t.” Kate glances back over her shoulder, and he shrugs. “My buddies have a daughter, and so do my—” He pauses for a second, trying to figure out whether calling Sam and Joe his in-laws is a little too big of a lie. She tips her head at him. “My partner’s got a bunch of nieces and nephews,” he finally says, “and one of them’s about five, too.”

Kate nods like she’s satisfied with that answer, and spins back around. Her signature’s a loopy mess of letters that look nothing like her actual name. She rolls the agreement up, hooks the pen cap to the top of it, and shoves the whole thing in his direction. 

“If you’re going to work with kids, you should spend some time with them,” she says.

Clint rolls his eyes. “I don’t usually work with kids,” he replies. Her expression softens slightly, her glare slowly transforming into something with a duller edge. “What?”

“Both times I’ve met you, you’ve been on kid cases.”

“You told Wade you’re not a kid.”

“And he’s totally bought into that, because I had to hear the intimate details of his date night with his boyfriend,” she retorts. Clint laughs without really meaning to as he tucks the paperwork into his back pocket. Kate watches him the whole time, arms crossed. Finally, she says, “You wouldn’t totally suck at the kid stuff if you worked at it.” When he snorts and rolls his eyes, her fingers tighten on her arms. “Tanner didn’t get it, but you and Wilson—mostly Wilson—do.”

He presses his lips together. “Get what, exactly?”

“Being a teenager,” she answers with a shrug. She slings her bag over her shoulder, but her eyes never really leave his. Clint spends the seconds of silence trying to chip away at the façade and find the girl underneath, but he finds out quickly that it’s like wading through a fog. Every time he thinks he detects a hint of her—a smile, a raised eyebrow, a hair flip—the mask slips down and covers her expression in another haze.

He wants to ask her what happened to her. Instead, he watches her brush hair out of her face. 

“It’s just,” she starts to say, and then cuts herself off, shaking her head. “Everyone acts like high school is supposed to be the best years of your life, you know? Full of adventures and bonfires and red-cup parties your parents never find out about.” She twists her fingers in the strap of her bag. “It’s nothing like that in reality. It just mostly sucks.”

“Yeah,” Clint echoes, nodding slightly. He slips his hands into his pockets and stands there for a moment, the old _it gets better_ speech rushing into his head, but the words dry up and turn to sand in the back of his mouth. He tries remembering up all the lines teachers used to feed him about finding himself, but they muddle together. Truth is, his teen years chewed him up and spit him out again, leaving him broken and terrified by the time he finished high school. He’d wandered around young adulthood in a haze, working dead-end jobs, smoking a lot of weed, and almost-dating a lot of nice girls who deserved better than him and the rest of the assholes in the park before he’d figured out that he needed to get out. 

His teenage years’d turned him into a lost adult who’d pretty much disowned his brother just to feel human.

There’s no ten-word speech for that shit.

He pulls in a breath and holds it for a couple seconds before he says, “You get out.”

Kate blinks at him. He watches her plant her heel for a second and realizes that she was about to leave before he opened his damn mouth. “What?” she asks.

“Being a teenager,” he answers, shrugging. “It sucks and it’s full of shit nobody’s ever ready to deal with, but it ends. You come out of it.”

She tips her head, and for a second, her expression’s something quiet and unreadable, a mystery that Clint can’t quite unravel. Then, she shakes her head. “Easy for you to say. You’re, like, ancient.”

“Thirty-six is hardly ancient,” he retorts.

“It’s ancient _enough_ ,” she returns, and her eyes sparkle in a momentary grin. When she walks toward the door, she purposely knocks their elbows together. Clint rolls his eyes at her back, but the split-second of mirth hardly lasts. 

Because when she hesitates, her hands on the door’s cross-bar, it feels a lot like she’s heading off to war.

“Kate,” he says suddenly. She twists around to look at him, her face caught up in surprise and maybe, he thinks, a touch of hope. He wets his lips. “What happened at that party? Really.”

The flash of hope on her face dissipates like smoke, and she drops her eyes to the carpet. “I thought I’m not supposed to talk to you, Prosecutor Barton,” she answers softly.

He releases a frustrated puff of breath. Well, no, not frustrated. It’s frustration wrapped up with a hundred other things: confusion, fear, curiosity, helplessness. He feels like he could know Kate Bishop if she’d just let him borrow her chisel for ten minutes.

He can’t tell her that, though. Instead, he shakes his head and says, “I’m not technically the prosecutor now that you’re on a diversion.”

“I’m pretty sure your prosecution police are pickier than that,” Kate retorts. Clint hears the tension in her voice, but she flashes him a brief, tight smile. “See you later, you dork.”

“I really _shouldn’t_ see you again,” he points out, and he swears he hears her laugh as she pushes out the door.

The office is a tomb by the time Clint steps back inside, and he tracks his way back to his desk to find the same stack of work waiting for him. He stares at it for a couple seconds before dropping the diversion agreement into his inbox and looking out the window at the parking lot. He can see the purple Volkswagen at the end of one of the rows, and he watches as it careens out of its parking space and drives away. 

When he sits back down at his desk, he opens an e-mail to Jessica Jones. _I need to know what happened to that girl_ , he types, not even bothering to add his e-mail signature.

He’s finished with the tickets and onto a motion he’s ignored for the last four days when Jones’s response chimes through. _Trust me when I say there are things you’re better off not knowing_ , the message reads, and Clint deletes it without a second thought.

 

==

 

“We can’t have sex all weekend,” Phil complains, pushing his face into the pillowcase. His back is a whole world of bare skin waiting for Clint’s attention; when Clint nuzzles his shoulder blade, he releases a breathy groan that spirals straight down to the pit of Clint’s belly. 

“Maybe not, but I’m willing to _try_ ,” Clint returns, and Phil’s shoulders shake as he laughs.

In Phil’s defense—not that he deserves one, since he’s complaining about spending a breezy summer day in their bedroom with the windows open, alternating between dozing off and having sex—Clint did sort of pounce on him when the shuttle dropped him off at the house that morning. The whole point of the shuttle’d been to keep Clint from needing to wake up at the ass crack of dawn and head out to the airport to pick Phil up, but Clint’d woken up that early anyway, Sandy stretched across his chest and pinning him to the bed. He’d showered, started some laundry, and headed out to at least mow the front yard before the big blue van pulled into the driveway.

The front yard’s only halfway finished. Clint even left the mower on the front walk.

But Phil’s shoes and shirt are lying in the hallway outside their bedroom and Phil’s pants are in rumpled pile at the foot of the bed, so Clint counts the whole thing as a win, anyway.

He rolls away from Phil to flop out on the mattress, boneless and finally relaxed. He’d spent the night before buried in the mystery of Kate Bishop’s sad smile as she’d ducked out of reception. He’d even gone as far as to call Stark and ask a little about Jones, frowning when the guy laughed down the phone at him.

“Jess is a stickler until she’s not a stickler,” Stark’d explained, and Clint’d rolled his eyes at the non-answer. “You want her on your side, you need to earn it, and trust me when I say you’d have better luck rigging one of those super-rigged carnival games at the state fair.”

“I don’t have any problem winning carnival games,” Clint’d retorted as he dug some mostly-edible leftovers out of the fridge. “And anyway, didn’t you actively hide information from her and almost lose your kid?”

“First, we’ve discussed the fact that you’re a freak of nature and that your uncannily-good aim bans you from _ever_ playing in my backyard beanbag tournaments ever again,” Tony’d returned. “And second, I didn’t actively hide anything. I just declined to share any of my less-than-savory past with her. Which, in my defense, was _because_ I wanted to keep my kid and my boyfriend. And look how that turned out.”

“Bruce dumped you for a couple weeks and you had to air all your dirty laundry in open court?”

“Tell me, were you always a pedantic asshole, or is that a side effect of getting up-close and personal with Coulson’s dick?” Clint’d burst out laughing hard enough that it almost hurt, and he swore he could hear Tony chuckling on the other end of the line. “Look,” the guy’d continued, “Jess’s been at this as long as Bruce. She’s good at what she does, and part of that’s knowing when to toe the line and when to stand way, _way_ back from it. If Kathy—”

“Kate.”

“—needs all her dirty laundry aired, Jess’ll go there. If not, she’ll clamp down on it like an attack dog at the junkyard and that’s the end of that.”

The microwave’d chimed just then, but all Clint’d managed a shake of his head. “Wade thinks I should let it go, you know,” he’d said after a few seconds.

Tony’d snorted. “I will deny the following statement until my dying day if you ever even think about repeating it, but on this one, Wilson’s probably right.”

Clint’s so caught up in remembering the conversation—which’d devolved into comments about Denver and _mile high blowjobs_ —that he misses Phil saying his name until it’s accompanied by lips against his shoulder. He turns his head, smiling, but Phil just raises both his eyebrows. “I’m away for four days and you retreat back into that place where you don’t talk to me,” he notes, worry in the back of his voice. Clint rolls his eyes as he nudges Phil with an elbow. Phil nudges him back, then scoots into his space and settles onto the same pillow. “The Bishop case?” he asks quietly.

Clint glances back up at the ceiling. “We’re definitely not gonna have sex all day if you kill the mood like that,” he complains.

“Clint, I’m forty-one years old. I’m not physically capable of having sex _all_ day.”

“I’ve heard that your pharmacist can fix that,” he returns, and Phil chuckles quietly. Clint shifts around to lay on his side and meet Phil’s gaze for a couple seconds. Phil’s always pulling him into jury selection or asking him to lurk in the back of a courtroom during hearings because of his “uncanny ability to see things that nobody else can,” but Clint’s pretty sure that Phil’s eyes are just as sharp. Nobody else on the planet can cut through his bullshit until his softest, most-flawed parts are showing.

He reaches out to idly skim fingers over Phil’s hip and up his side. “She signed the diversion,” he says. “Unless she violates the terms, the case is over. I don’t need to care about it anymore.”

The corners of Phil’s eyes crinkle. “But?” he asks.

“There shouldn’t _be_ a but.” Clint flops back onto his back again, scrubbing his face with his hands. “I’m used to these straightforward cases, you know? Black and white. You sped or you didn’t, and hey, here’s a cop who can tell you exactly how fast you were going thanks to his radar.” He looks back at Phil. “Even with Killgrave, there wasn’t this much—”

The word escapes him and the sentence devolves into a sigh. “Flotsam and jetsam?” Phil suggests.

“Something like that,” Clint admits, and presses his cheek a little harder into the pillow.

For a couple seconds all they do is watch each other, separated by less than a foot of mattress and not much else. Clint wants a hundred things in those seconds; he wants to forget about Kate Bishop, sure, but he also wants to kiss the thoughtful expression right off Phil’s face, to burrow himself back into Phil’s heat for the rest of the day, to pretend like they’re not both heading back to work in two different jurisdictions on Monday. He closes his eyes while Phil runs fingertips over his bare skin and slowly sigh at his own stupidity.

“We don’t like dealing in uncertainty,” Phil says after a couple seconds, and Clint glances over at him. “Most of what we do involves eliminating shades of gray and proving, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the black in front of us is definitely _not_ white.” Phil’s hand wanders all the way up to his shoulder, and he turns his head and nuzzles his nose against his wrist for one, idiotic second. “Someone who drives drunk, a man who kills a fifteen-year-old boy in cold blood, that’s easy. A lost teenager who makes a bad decision, that’s anything but.”

Clint nods. “Yeah, but I still wish I knew what was going on in her head,” he replies. “I know all the reasons I made fucked up choices back in high school, you know? I can’t even crack the surface of what’s going on with her.”

“To be fair, she’s sixteen. _She_ might not even know what’s going on in her head.”

Clint raises his eyebrows. “You really believe that?”

“No, I don’t,” Phil admits, and draws him in for a long, lazy kiss.

They lie in bed for a while after that, lounging on each other without really talking until Phil pats Clint on the thigh and rolls out of bed. He runs a hot shower and drags Clint in after him, not so much to be sexy (though Phil naked and damp is always sexy) but to “make sure you actually get out of bed.” Clint laughs at him and steals the fluffiest towel in the linen closet as punishment. He finishes mowing the front yard while Phil works his way through the DVR—“I missed _Undercover Boss_ ,” he complains, and Clint rolls his eyes—and they split some leftover pizza while lounging on the couch. They’re bickering about who’s gonna head out to mow the back when the doorbell rings, and Clint groans as he drags himself to the front door.

On their front porch, Dot Barnes rocks so far back on her heels in her little white sandals that Clint thinks she might fall over. He reaches out a hand just in case; halfway down their front walk, Bucky rolls his eyes at him. She peers at his hand for a second before glancing up at him.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi?” Clint asks. A couple steps behind him, Phil chuckles. He’s never understood how Phil figured out how to charm every five-year-old he meets, but it’s a life skill he’d like to pick up. “Can I help you?”

She nods, her pigtails bobbing. “I want to play with your kitty.”

“Dot,” Steve warns. He’s hovering back by the car, a brown paper sack sitting on the trunk. Clint recognizes the logo from a local bakery, one of their favorites. He meets Steve’s eyes before he nods at the bag; Steve at least drops his eyes like he’s embarrassed. 

But Dot’s five and, as far as Clint can tell, clueless about social cues. She crosses her arms before huffing out a long, bitter sigh. “Can I play with your kitty, please?” 

“We brought bribery,” Bucky adds with a crooked little grin.

“Cupcakes,” Steve corrects, “not bribery.”

“I think they’re one and the same,” Phil says from behind Clint’s shoulder, and reaches around to open the screen door for Dot. The kid rushes in fast enough that she’s mostly a ball of pink clothes and blonde hair, but Phil stays close anyway, his body pressed up against Clint’s as he holds the door for Bucky and Steve. Clint can’t decide why he’s earned all the casual touch, but he loves every second of it.

“Sorry,” Steve apologizes once they’re all inside and the door bangs shut behind them. “I texted, but—”

“We were busy,” Phil replies. Bucky raises both his eyebrows, and Clint decides it’s time to rub the side of his neck. “If this is about that retrial, I got your e-mail and was going to reply tonight.”

“No, we’re really just in it for your cat,” Bucky says. He’s already barefoot in the hallway—the guy wears flip-flops like a surfer even though he usually dresses like he stepped out of a fashion magazine—but he stops long enough to flash Steve a shitty little grin.

Steve just sighs. “Please don’t turn that into another joke,” he grumbles, and his husband snickers like a school kid. “We had breakfast at Tony’s. It was like spending the morning with _three_ teenage boys instead of just Miles.”

“And you loved it,” Bucky needles, crowding into Steve’s personal space and pressing their shoulders together.

“Did I?” Steve returns, but Clint catches the warmth in his voice and the tiny smile nudging the corners of his mouth. 

By the time they make it into the kitchen, Phil and Dot are already there with Sandy, who’s purring up a storm. Dot’s sitting cross-legged on their kitchen island in her frilly, tiered skirt, armed with the canister of tuna-scented cat treats. She shakes it, and Sandy climbs onto her lap, revving like an engine.

“Don’t tease the kitty,” Steve warns. Dot tosses a snotty little look over her shoulder at him, and he raises both his eyebrows. They stare at each other, Steve crossing his arms over his broad chest while his daughter refuses to blink. 

Bucky heaves a sigh and rolls his eyes. “If you’re interested,” he comments to Clint, “I’m looking to offload a husband who doesn’t know how to choose his battles with a five-year-old. I heard you might have an empty bed four or five nights a week.”

Clint snorts and tries to hide his smile, but he busts out laughing when Dot, still glaring at her father, shoves the treat can at Phil for him to open it. Phil smiles, the fine lines around his eyes crinkling; Steve’s jaw tightens, proof he’s lost the battle. When he finally gives up on the battle of wills, he shoves the bakery bag in his husband’s direction. “You’re not helping,” he grumbles.

“Because she’s _five_ ,” Bucky returns. He pulls out two flats of cupcakes—all of them frosted in a rainbow of warm, summery pastels—and starts breaking the seals. “We’re trying to prep her for kindergarten, not Harvard. Lighten up a little.” 

Steve holds onto the annoyed expression even as Bucky nudges him first with his elbow and then with his hip. In fact, it’s not until Dot crows, “She’s eating from my fingers, Daddy!” that the ghost of a smile wins out.

Not that it lasts all that long, of course. ‘Cause as soon as Steve finally looks like he’s loosening up, Phil’s cell phone starts ringing. It’s his default ringtone, which is unusual—he’s got a thousand different tones set for their co-workers, mostly so he knows when and when not to answer—and both Steve and Bucky glance at each other. Clint ignores their weird, curious expressions as Phil abandons Dot and the cat to grab his phone.

He frowns at the screen, then half-heartedly waves it at the three of them. “It’s Ken,” he says, and Clint only realizes he’s bit the inside of his cheek after it starts to hurt. “He had a witness interview this morning, said he was going to call if—”

“Then get it,” Clint says. The words sound robotic, and Phil glances at him for a half-second too long. Clint waves a hand at the silent question. After all, he’s not an asshole, and Phil’s job—well, his temporary job, the one where everybody’s a stranger and he’s five hours away—matters.

Phil nods at him and answers his phone on his way out the back door.

By the time Clint glances back at Bucky and Steve, he’s dragged his fingers through his hair and scrubbed his palm over his face to hide from their nosy glances. He watches them talk without actually saying a single word—it’s all twitching eyebrows, pursed lips, and chin juts, the language of two guys who’ve known each other for a good half their lives—until he can’t take it anymore. 

“What?” he asks.

Bucky shrugs a little. He’s wearing a tight gray t-shirt that hints at the tattoos on his upper arms, and Clint finds himself staring at those instead of meeting his eyes. “Just wondering if Tony’s right,” he says.

“About?”

Steve pulls in a short, nervous breath like every time he tip-toes around a delicate topic. “About Phil and Blake,” he answers. Clint feels himself square his shoulders defensively. “I’m not suggesting that he took this special prosecution job because of it,” Steve presses, “just that—”

“They’re friends,” Clint interrupts. He’s not in the mood to hear it, really, another treatise on what kind of friends his guy and Blake might’ve been fifteen-plus years ago. The federal job’s important, he reminds himself. Phil’d only interrupt their weekend—never mind their time with guests—if the call mattered. 

He only realizes he’s dissecting a cupcake when he smears green frosting along the side of his hand. When he reaches for a napkin, he catches Bucky watching him. “ _What_?”

Bucky shrugs, the pad of his thumb in his mouth. Clint guesses he’s spent the last couple seconds of silence sucking frosting off them from the pink flush that’s settled high on Steve’s cheeks. “Tony’s not always wrong,” he says after a couple seconds. “And he definitely wouldn’t lead you astray.”

“On what planet?” Clint demands, snorting a laugh. 

Steve frowns. “On the planet where Tony likes you a lot.”

Clint huffs a breath. “Like that’s a real place,” he retorts, and dives back into his cupcake.

Phil reemerges all of two minutes later, warm and smiling, and the whole thing about Blake is promptly forgotten. They dig out some cat toys and watch Dot and Sandy run around through the kitchen and living room, eating cupcakes and drinking afternoon beer. Phil shares stories about the last three days in Denver—the sights, the horrible pizza in the federal building cafeteria, the snippy secretaries who apparently aren’t fond of strangers in their office—and for the first time, Clint finds himself laughing. He feels stupid by the end of it, like he’s spent all his time in the last week building a mountain out of a molehill and carving out a moat around it. Nothing’s changed because of a five-hour drive, he realizes—and nothing _will_ unless he’s the idiot who screws it up.

An hour or so later, Bucky, Steve, and Dot head out to their car. Dot darts around her parents, reliving every moment with the cat—according to Steve, she’s _desperate_ for a pet—while they pretend to listen and really just talk to one another. Their arms and shoulders bump, casual and easy, and Clint feels a weird pang envy bubbling up somewhere in the pit of his gut.

The feeling curls fingers around his stomach, and he almost says something to Phil about it ‘til he glances over and sees that his guy’s staring at him with a little smile. They watch each other for a couple seconds too long, the breeze that sneaking in through the screen door. Clint tries to find the words again, but they end up tangled on the back of his tongue. Best he can do is wet his lips.

“Sorry about the call,” Phil says after a while longer. In the corner of his vision, Clint catches Steve and Bucky driving away; another car rolls down the street after them, seconds or maybe minutes behind, but he hardly pays attention.

Instead, he shrugs and shakes his head. “It’s not important,” he replies, and this time, he means it.

 

==

 

“I need you,” Thor says in a rush on Monday morning, and disappears down the hallway before Clint can even glance away from the coffee pot.

The office is always a flurry of activity on Mondays, and this one’s no exception. Aside from their usual staff meeting, Monday mornings are cluttered up by three different dockets (Phil’s felony docket, Bucky’s misdemeanor docket, and Thor’s juvenile offender cases), at least one jury selection (today, both Natasha and Maria are picking out juries), and a stack of weekend police reports so tall that they threaten to topple off Darcy’s desk. Clint’s watched most of his coworkers run around like chickens with their heads cut off; even as he picks up his mug of Maria’s steaming sludge, he can hear Tony shouting orders at Pepper and the interns bickering over a missing training manual. 

He sighs and closes his eyes, letting the noise ebb and flow around him like a rushing river. He and Phil’d spent their Sunday like normal—working around the house, running errands, jogging around their neighborhood, lounging naked on their bed—but once he’d dropped Phil at the airport, the house’d felt empty again. He’d started and abandoned two different books before giving into his urge to watch a bunch of brainless TV and settle into an uncertain, restless sleep.

“You know I’m counting down the days until the weekend, right, boss?” he’d teased Phil as they stood at the airport drop-off, his hands planted firmly on Phil’s hips so the airport cops wouldn’t complain about the two of them holding off traffic.

Phil’d smiled at him. “You’re not necessarily alone in that,” he’d replied, and the airport cops _definitely_ bitched when their goodbye kiss turned into a series of long, hungry goodbye kisses.

He’s remembering those kisses, lingering and heady in the heat of the summer evening, when Thor says, “Friend Clint.” He jerks out of his memory to find the other man looming in the doorway. He’s in his full suit—tie, jacket, waistcoat, the whole nine yards—and his hair is pulled back in a small blond ponytail. He holds himself about ten degrees too tight.

He definitely doesn’t smile. “You need me?” Clint asks.

Thor nods, and Clint frowns. He’s pinch-hit for a lot of the other prosecutors over the last year, but Bruce almost always covers for Thor since the two of them are the only ones fluent in both family law and Judge Ilsa Smithe. In fact, the longer Thor stares him at him, the more Clint realizes that he’s only ever handled one juvenile offender case.

He sets his mug down on the counter, and Clint tries to ignore the way his stomach turns at the thought of actually _drinking_ his coffee. “Bishop?” 

“Jessica Jones called me a few minutes earlier and requested you by name.” Thor’s voice sounds wrong, controlled and measured where it normally booms across the office. “There’s been an incident at Kate Bishop’s school and she wants someone there who has a rapport with the girl. She said she attempted to contact Wade Wilson but that he’s attending—”

“A CLE today, yeah,” Clint immediately answers. His mind flashes back to the dozens of texts about cancelling muy thai for a half-second, then pushes them aside. Thor keeps staring him down. “Kate fired her last defense attorney,” he says dumbly, “but I think Nate Summers and Carol Danvers pick up Wade’s defense work when he’s out of the office if you wanna try—”

“Clint,” Thor interrupts, and the honed edge to his tone stops all of Clint’s words in their tracks. He closes his mouth and rolls his lips together as the more the cold hand of worry tightens in his chest. 

The first sign of emotion on Thor’s face is something slow and quiet, and it creeps into his eyes when he meets Clint’s gaze. “Miss Bishop is not the perpetrator in this incident,” he says, and Clint feels his heart drop into his stomach. “She’s the victim.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be announcing some stuff about the next Motion Practice Friday, the trajectory of my Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. side-story "The Cardboard Hedgehog," and my plans for the MPU sabbatical on [my tumblr](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com) this weekend. Stop by and say hi! You know, if you want.
> 
> Also: thank you all for continuing to read, enjoy, and comment on this story. For some reason, Diversions is frequently really hard to write, and I've worried about it more than any other story in the series (including Wade's story). But every time I start to feel like it's a train wreck, I receive the most wonderful comments, and it keeps me chugging along. I am so grateful for every one of you. Thank you so, so much.


	9. The Search for the Beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, an incident at Kate’s school leaves Clint desperate to figure out where all Kate’s troubles began—even if it means driving himself a little crazy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains some epithets and slurs, specifically regarding women and homosexuality. 
> 
> Once again, I edited this chapter after my wonderful betas (that'd be Jen and saranoh, in case you've not caught their names) read through it. They did a marvelous job, especially with quashing my repetition. All mistakes are my own. They make no mistakes.

“You wanna talk about it?” Clint asks, folding his hands on top of the crappy pressboard desk.

“Not really, no,” Kate Bishop replies, and shreds her Kleenex into tiny pieces.

The “philosophy and rhetoric classroom—whatever the hell that means—at Holy Trinity Preparatory Academy is nothing like the rooms Clint remembers from his shitty high school experience. The desks are all the same fake, scratched-up wood grain as twenty years ago, sure, but everything else is newer, sharper, and shinier. The “chalkboards” are all the kind you can hook into a computer, ones that display fancy programs and interactive and definitely don’t involve actual chalk; a bank of computers lines one of the walls, and there are power jacks in various places around the room for students to plug in their own laptops or whatever other technology rich teenagers lug with them to school. Posters of long-dead white guys peer at them from all over the white cinderblock walls, unblinking as Kate pulls yet another expensive Vicks-treated tissue out of the box just to rip it up.

“Besides,” she adds after a couple seconds, her eyes focused on her next menthol-scented victim, “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

Clint snorts. “I think the prosecutorial police’ll make an exception for today,” he replies, and although she nods, she never smiles.

The whole school hums like a living, breathing thing, the voices of students in the hallway floating into the classroom like the echoes of ghosts. He thinks a couple times he hears Thor or maybe Detective Howlett bark at somebody to walk on past the classroom, but then the voice disappears and leaves them alone with the white noise buzz of the florescents.

Clint’s still not sure what exactly he’d expected to find when he and Thor pulled into the circle drive outside the school and parked crookedly behind an unmarked police car. He’d spent most of the drive imagining all kinds of doomsday scenarios; he’d sped right through yellow lights and violated a half-dozen lesser traffic ordinances just ‘cause his brain’d kept running away with him. He’d pictured Kate like the next Jordan Silva-Riberio, bloody and discarded like somebody’s week-old garbage, and his stomach’d churned the whole way over.

But instead of finding Kate Bishop in a puddle of her own half-dried blood, he’d discovered her tucked up in a plush swivel chair in the philosophy-and-whatever room, armed with a box of tissues. When the door’d closed behind him, she’d swept a bunch of ripped up tissue pieces into the trash without so much as a glance in his direction.

He’d crossed the room slowly, stripping out of his suit jacket and loosening his tie, and eventually, he’s sunk into one of the student desks in the very front row. He’d felt—he still _feels_ —too big for the damn thing, the tray support digging into his side.

After a couple more seconds, Kate’d said, “I figured they’d send Jess.”

“Miss Jones is in court, but she’ll come when she’s done.”

Kate’d released a tiny, huffy breath. “Saving other kids?”

“I guess,” he’d replied, and silence’d swept over the both of them like its own kind of biblical plague.

It’s still spreading around them now, and Clint rolls his lips together. Kate sweeps the latest pile of tissue pieces into the trash, then brushes off her hands like there’s grains of fluffy white dust left over. When she finally glances up at him, her eyes are as sharp and fearless, no hint of tears. 

Except a second later, she worries her lower lip between her teeth, and Clint realizes just how much of her fearlessness is really some kind of act.

“What do you want to hear?” she asks, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms over her chest. “Because I’d rather wait for Jess to talk about my _feelings_.”

Clint raises his hands. “I just wanna help,” he tells her. She rolls her eyes as the silence sweeps back across the room, and a spark of something like helplessness runs through Clint’s veins. He’d felt the same thing in the car on the way over and again when he and Thor’d walked past the “crime scene” in the hallway. He wets his lips. “Jessica wanted somebody who knows you to come here and talk to you,” he says. “There’s not a ton of people on that list, and I don’t really know what _kind_ of talking she wants, but—”

“But you figure you can break through the crunchy candy shell into my soft, creamy center?” Kate snaps. She shoves the chair away from the desk and shoots out of it. She paces all the way to a bulletin board advertising quotes from obscure philosophers and glares at it. 

Clint stares at her back before he says, “What happened is actually—”

“Assholes being assholes?” she retorts. She flips her ponytail over her shoulder and twists around to glance at him. “Somebody called me a cunt. It’s not even the first time.”

“Maybe,” he replies, raising his hands, “but I’m willing to bet even money that it’s the first time somebody’s spray-painted it across a bank of lockers for the whole world to see.”

Kate snorts at him and immediately turns back to the bulletin board.

Clint drags a hand through his hair. He’d stood in the hallway with Thor and the detectives for a long time, staring at the blood-red, all-caps scrawl: _KATE BISHOP IS A CUNT!_ He’d read and re-read it a dozen times, his stomach clenching as he’d pictured some little shit snickering his way through every sloppy letter. Clint’d known vandals back in high school—Barney and the Tracy brothers’d topped the school’s “most wanted” list for a couple years—and he can still remember their glee every time they’d scrawled _slut_ or _faggot_ on somebody’s locker—or carved it into the cover of their math book.

The one time some asshole kid called Clint a name like that, Barney’d beat the guy until his knuckles bled and keyed _dick-licker_ into his car.

Whether he’d understood the fucked-up irony in that, Clint’s still not sure. 

“Kate,” he starts to say, his voice caught somewhere in the back of his throat, but the classroom door swings open before Kate bothers glancing at him. She jumps instead, her whole body tensing, and swipes her fingers under her eyes quickly as she turns back around. 

Detective Howlett and his partner—a long, lean woman in black jeans and a black leather jacket who sports a head of silver hair twisted into some kind of rock star mohawk—lead the charge into the room, with Thor only a couple steps behind. His face is totally empty of its usual warmth, and something like frustration flashes across it when he looks over his shoulder at the woman in the business suit who’s following hot on his heels.

She’s probably in her late forties, her face creased with fine lines that her thick-rimmed glasses only half-hide, and her hair is brown save for one bright red streak that’s near the front of her face. As Clint watches, she tucks that strand behind her ear and crosses her arms over her crisp suit jacket and crisper white shirt. Her entire body’s as sharp as her gaze as she narrows her attention in on Kate. 

“I don’t think there’s any need to keep you sequestered at this point, Miss Bishop,” she says by way of a greeting, and Clint feels something in the pit of his stomach clench. Across the room, Kate digs her fingernails into her arms, her expression as unflinching as all the white guys in the philosophy posters, but Clint catches the anger and hurt that flashes through her eyes. The woman, on the other hand, just raises her eyebrows. “The detectives have assured me that they will be conducting interviews throughout the rest of the school day,” she continues, her even voice cutting through the silence. “We have an additional school security officer coming over from the elementary school. But I think that, until your psychologist arrives—”

“Group therapist,” Kate corrects sharply.

The woman tilts her head to one side, her lips pursing, and the two stare at each other for a full thirty seconds. “Your therapist, then,” she amends. She sounds almost disappointed. “Either way, until she arrives, I think it’s best you can return to class.”

Kate’s entire body clenches hard enough that it reminds Clint a lot of watching somebody throw up. Her nails dig further into her arms as she stands there, tight from head to toe. Frustration coils like a snake in the bottom of Clint’s stomach, and he only realizes that he’s stood up from the desk and squared his shoulders after it’s happened.

Thor, who’s spent the last couple minutes standing against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, glances over and meets Clint’s eyes for the express purpose of shaking his head. Clint grits his teeth, but somehow, some ugly part of him—the Barton in him, he thinks ruefully, the part that knows _fight_ but’s never heard of _flight_ —breaks through his years of hard-earned restraint.

“You can’t just send her back to class after what happened,” he tells the woman tightly, and he watches as her brow creases in confusion as much as surprise. “What if the kid who did that’s in one of her classes? What if he’s waiting to harass her some more? You wanna just throw her back into that?”

The woman uncrosses her arms and lets her hands fall to her hips. “With all due respect, Mister— Burton, was it?”

“Barton,” Thor answers, his voice uncharacteristically even. When Clint glances over, he rolls his lips together and shakes his head again. Clint just scowls at him.

“Mister Barton, then.” The woman’s humorless gaze sweeps over Clint’s face, and he wonders how many students she’s undone with what he’s pretty sure is some kind of alpha-dog staring contest.

But Clint’s not afraid to stare right back.

Finally, though, she shrugs. “What we’re dealing with here is a vandal, not a criminal mastermind,” she says simply. “Kate has assured me that she isn’t afraid of anyone in the building and that she doesn’t know who’s responsible. There’s no reason to keep her in here, on her own, while she’s missing the last day of classes before her finals.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Clint can see Kate leaning back against the bulletin board, her arms still crossed too-tight over her chest. He remembers his own high school days, backed into a corner and gripping his own arms to keep himself from diving into a fight he’d never actually win. The memory chokes him, and he presses his hands to his thighs to keep from balling them into fists. “She’s the victim of a crime,” he tells the woman. “Somebody _did_ that to her. And I don’t know who you think you are—”

The woman flashes him a predatory smile. “You mean besides the principal of this school?” 

“—but you can’t just send somebody who’s been harassed by some teenaged _assclown_ back into the lion’s den.”

The principal—Clint thinks for a second that her last name’s a body part, not that he knows which one—barely maintains her humorless smile. Her cheek twitches. “Mister Barton, if I can assure you one thing, it’s this: Kate Bishop is never a victim.”

Every syllable smashes against him like fists slugging him in the gut, and for a couple too-slow seconds, he’s not Assistant District Attorney Clint Barton anymore. No, those words change him into a thousand other people: a little kid with no parents and a broken-hearted big brother who can’t stop crying; an older, more fucked-up kid with a stranger for a guardian who packs them into the car and drives them down to Suffolk County; a teenager with a screwed-up brother who kicks the stuffing out of the first guy Clint considers hooking up with; a young adult with no idea what his life’s supposed to be who screams at his brother ‘cause he can’t scream at himself. All at once, he’s three, thirty, five, and fifteen, and he remembers conversations with _his_ principals that’d sounded just the same as this one, the disappointment and frustration etched on their faces as they called him an instigator and dismissed him.

Like he couldn’t be a victim if he’d responded to the shit around him.

In a lot of ways, Phil’d been the first person to understand that the two things maybe weren’t mutually exclusive.

The only thing stronger than the fierce bolt of longing that grips his stomach in that second is the spike of _anger_ that rushes right through him. And this time, his hands definitely curl into fists.

“A sixteen-year-old girl just had somebody call her a cunt by spraying it across a fucking bank of lockers!” he shouts, and the principal snaps back like he’s just reached out and slapped her across the face. “I know this is the kind of school where parents pay you to ignore bullshit like this, but you are _not_ sending Kate back to class after somebody’s painted her name and a _slur_ for the whole world to see!” 

He catches himself gesturing, big sweeps of his hands that he can’t help, and he shoves them back down at his sides before he accidentally smacks something. Except then he _wants_ to smack something, to punch or kick a desk until woman what realizes what an enormous _moron_ she’s being.

He’s still considering that very thing when a big hand lands on his shoulder and physically pulls him back a foot or two. He stumbles over his own feet, almost losing his balance, and twists to meet Thor’s glare. As he jerks himself out of the other man’s grip, he realizes that Thor’s grabbed his suit jacket off the desk where Clint left it.

They stare at each other for a beat too long. Then, Thor says, “It is time to leave.”

“Leave?” Clint demands, turning on his heel to gape at him. Thor nods once, and Clint rolls his eyes. “We can’t _leave_ her here if all they’re gonna do is send her back to class and ignore—”

Thor shuts him up by shoving his suit coat into his chest hard enough to knock the wind out of him. “The detectives have promised they will look after Miss Bishop,” he says tightly, and Clint can hear the barely-there calm in his voice starting to fray. “We must return to the office.”

“Thor—”

“We are _going_ ,” Thor snaps, and pushes Clint bodily toward the door.

Clint spins on his heel and storms out of the classroom, ignoring the other man’s polite goodbyes to walk right out into the hallway and kick one of the defiled lockers. The only student within shouting distance is a reedy blond with thick glasses; the second Clint glances in his direction, he scurries into the stairwell and out of sight. Clint kicks the locker again, harder, and then tips his head up to stare at the long, dried drips of paint that trail off the words _IS A CUNT!_ When he stares long enough that the color starts to blur, he presses the heels of hands into his eye sockets and slumps against the lockers.

He’s still standing there when he hears Thor comment, “You are not Kate Bishop.”

Clint huffs out a breath that sounds a little like a bitter laugh. “Never said I was.”

“No, but you see yourself in her.” Clint drops his hands away from his eyes just in time to watch Thor shrug, his big shoulders stretching his suit coat. “You’ve been through things in your youth not unlike this, and you want to protect her in a way you could not protect yourself.” Clint shakes his head, but Thor just raises his eyebrows. “Am I wrong?”

“You’re something,” Clint returns, but after he releases another long breath he realizes that the fight’s drained right out of him. He leans his head back against the cool metal of the lockers and tries to imagine a happy Kate Bishop laughing in the hallway with all the other well-dressed rich kids. It’s a couple seconds later when he finally sighs. “This case is gonna be the death of me,” he admits, and glances over at Thor. The guy’s standing with his arms crossed, and Clint rolls his eyes. “I’m not gonna go back in there and punch Principal Harpy in the face,” he promises. “You can stand down.”

“Hand,” Thor replies.

“What?”

“Her name is Principal Hand.” Clint blinks at him, and he raises his hands. “I did not name her.”

For some reason, Clint’s next snort of laughter breaks a little of the tension and he smiles for the first time in the last couple hours. Thor grins back at him.

“I’m not Kate Bishop,” Clint says after another couple seconds, his head lolling back against the lockers. “But I— You can kind of tell, if you’re looking, which kids’ve been through hell. I mean, I knew the thrill-seekers, the kids who fought and drank and screwed just ‘cause they _could_ , and Kate—” He shakes his head. “She’s not that.”

“And yet,” Thor replies evenly, “she fights.”

“Fought,” Clint returns. Thor rolls his lips together. “She’s not fighting anymore,” he presses. “At the party, yeah, she fought. But since then, she’s turned into a whole different kid. It’s like she’s got a thousand personalities, and she’s only letting us meet the ones she wants us to know about.”

Thor nods, and for a moment they stare at each other in the empty hallway, the only sound between them the hum of the air conditioning. Finally, though, Thor drops his hands to his hips, his suit jacket flaring out like a cape.

“Your partner once told me that the beginning of a case is not always the beginning,” he says simply, his eyes never leaving Clint’s own. “It is easy, he said, to convince ourselves that the first event in our file—the battery, the vandalism, the assault—is the start of the story, even when it is really the middle.” He shrugs. “Perhaps it is the same for this case.”

Clint snorts a little. “I’m not even sure where to start _looking_ for the beginning.”

Thor smiles at him. “I think you may be leaning on it,” he replies casually, and leaves Clint to stare at the red spray paint as he walks away. 

 

==

 

“And then Thor told me to take your advice and find the beginning of the case—whatever the fuck that means,” Clint complains Wednesday night, and flops onto bed with his cell phone dangling over his face.

On the other end of their Facetime connection, Phil chuckles, his grin bunching all his laugh lines. He’d stripped down to his undershirt and pajama pants while Clint wolf-whistled at the shaky image and suggested they chat in the nude; whether the appearance of his sexy glasses is as retaliation for the harassment, Clint’ll never know. Either way, Phil’s eyes twinkle as he readjusts his ear buds, and Clint spends a minute basking in the existence of him, the world’s greatest sight for sore eyes.

Monday’d ended about as well as you’d expect from a day that’d involved snapping at a high school principal, and Clint’d pretty much burrowed himself in his damn work to keep his temper from flaring up again. He’d trudged through files for his Tuesday docket and prepped for an upcoming bench trial as best he could, but his brain’d kept rushing right back to Kate Bishop and the ugly red words from the school hallway. In the end, he’d spent a lot of time sitting in his pile of pillows and staring out the window at the dreary, sunless day.

On his way out, he’d stopped by Darcy’s desk and stuck a post-it to the middle of her monitor: _call Holy Trinity for school records for KEB’s vics_

In the morning, Darcy’s return post-it had retorted, _you’re lucky you’re my supervising attorney, bucko_.

But Tuesday morning’d meant docket, and Clint had been forced to abandon his post-it war with Darcy to duck in and out of a dozen random hearings. Worse, Dot’d thrown up at day care that morning—something about stealing frosting out of the fridge and eating it with a spoon, as far as Clint’d understood—and he’d needed to cover for Steve while he nursed his kid back to health. By the end of the day, he’d felt like death warmed over—and he’d totally missed his chance to ask Darcy about the school records, too.

He’s about ready to bitch about all this to Phil—how his legs feel like jelly, how he could probably sleep for a week and still not feel rested, how he’s two days from a bench trial he’s absolutely not ready for—but when he drags his mind back to the present, Phil’s smiling at him through the grainy iPad camera. 

Before Clint can really help it, he catches himself grinning right back. “My complaining can’t be that funny.”

Phil snorts at him. “Maybe I like looking at you,” he retorts. Even on the grainy camera, Clint’s able to catch the light flush that crosses his cheekbones. He drops his eyes to fiddle with something on the crappy hotel room desk, and for a second, Clint’s never missed him more.

He’s not sure how the hell to explain that, though, so instead he twists around on the bed and props himself up on an elbow. Phil glances back at the screen, blatantly eyeing Clint’s shoulder and upper arm, and he grins at the guy. “You gonna paint me like one of your Coloradan models?” he asks, his voice about as low and sultry as he can force it without bursting out laughing.

Phil rolls his eyes, but there’s dark and promising about how he wets his lips, and all the early summer heat pools in the pit of Clint’s belly. But then, his guy sort of shakes his head at him. “Tempting as that is,” he says quietly, almost like he’s trying to convince _himself_ , “I need to be up at six tomorrow.”

Clint shrugs a little and flashes him his best unfazed grin. “Hey, Jack really only sketches her,” Phil frowns at him. “You know, in _Titanic_. They save the sex for the old car in the cargo bay.”

They stare at each other for exactly one beat before Phil bursts out laughing, and if that’s not the best sound in the universe, Clint’s not sure what is.

He settles further onto the bed as Phil recovers, his laugh lines bunching, and Clint tucks his head on his arm as he watches the guy grin at him. “This six a.m. thing a Blake mandate, or what?” Phil shakes his head. “Okay, then, lemme guess: McDonalds stops serving breakfast at seven out there. Or maybe you have to beat the rush at Denver’s only Starbucks?”

“Says the man who still drinks Folgers right out of the coffee pot.”

“Don’t you start talking shit about the best part of waking up.”

“I recall a time when you said that about me.”

“Honeymoon’s over the second you mock my coffee,” Clint retorts, and Phil laughs again.

The warmth and familiarity of the sound chases the last couple days’ tension away, but the second Phil’s smile finally dims, Clint’s able to see how tired he looks. There’re dark circles hanging under his eyes, and all his fine lines look more like deep trenches. Clint wants to reach through the phone and smooth them away, but of course, nobody’s invented that technology yet.

Instead, he smiles. “How’s the special prosecution gig, really?” he asks. When surprise flashes across Phil’s face, he shrugs. “Just curious,” he promises. “Not trying to drag you home or anything.”

“Because you’d never do that,” Phil teases, but his weary smile only highlights all the worry and exhaustion that plays across his face. “It’s definitely different,” he explains after a couple seconds. “Ken runs a fast-paced office, so there’s not a lot of downtime. Novak’s invoked speedy trial and his attorney’s filing all sorts of motions this week and next, and Ken wants us ahead of the curve. Which is great—intellectually challenging, never a dull moment, all of that—but it’s also—” He sighs and shakes his head, like he’s clearing away cobwebs. “In our office, there wouldn’t even be a curve to stay ahead of at this point.”

“Unless Stark was talking about the curve of Bruce’s ass.” Phil blinks at him for a second, eyebrows raised, and Clint rolls his eyes. “We’re getting weekly ‘Bruce Banner Birthday Fun Facts’ in our e-mail,” he explains. Phil scowls, and Clint grins. “Stark spent last weekend graphing the equation for Bruce’s—and I swear this is a quote—‘bodacious buttocks,’ then sent us instructions about plugging it into Google.”

For a second, Phil’s so damn quiet and still that Clint thinks maybe his phone’s frozen. Then, slowly, he asks, “Do you think Tony actually enjoys sex with his husband?”

Clint frowns. “The hell’d that come from?”

Phil shrugs. “It just seems that, for a guy who really enjoys his sex, he devotes a lot of time to making sure Bruce never sleeps with him again.”

The delivery’s so perfectly deadpan that Clint almost misses it, but when he bursts out laughing, Phil laughs right along with him. All his exhaustion washes away as he grins like the cat that caught the canary, and Clint swears he can still see the shadow of that smile as Phil switches off the desk lamp and plunges the display into darkness. Hazy half-shapes bob and weave in the dim light from the one remaining hotel lamp until Phil finally settles himself onto the bed, iPad in hand. He fluffs his pillow before he curls into it, just like at home, and for a second, Clint pretends they’re in the same half-dark room, minutes away from tangling together in sleep. The thought kind of soothes him.

The problem with loving somebody as hard as he loves Phil, he thinks for a second, is how bad you miss them when they’re not right there next to you.

“I did tell Thor to find the beginning of a case, once,” Phil says softly, and Clint only realizes how long they’ve laid there in silence when he jerks back awake from a lazy half-doze. Phil smiles at him, his face shadowed in the dim hotel light, and shrugs slgihtly. “He had a kid who’d racked up a dozen criminal threat charges for phone harassment. I helped him figure out what’d kicked the whole thing off—and he managed to settle the case.”

Clint snorts and shakes his head. “Leave it to Thor to miss the forest for the trees.”

“More like missing the trees for the forest fire,” Phil replies. He holds onto his smile for another second or two, but then his lips purse into a tight, thoughtful line. After a couple seconds, he adds, “I meant what I told him, about beginnings.”

“But?” 

“But I think you need to ask yourself why this beginning—this _case_ —matters so much to you—and who exactly you’re doing this _for_.” Even with the near-dark of the hotel room and the crappy cell phone display, Clint feels Phil’s fierce eyes searching his face. He turns far enough away that he can stare at the ceiling, but the longer he’s quiet, the more he’s _sure_ that Phil’s reading him like a book.

He wants to explain why he cares so damn much, why Kate Bishop _matters_.

The problem is, he’s all out of words. 

When he glances back at his phone, Phil’s still watching him, his face somehow both bland and gorgeous in the yellow glow of the bedside lamp. Clint forces himself to swallow before he asks, “That a piece of advice from Special Prosecutor Coulson, boss?”

“No,” Phil replies, his smile tiny and, somehow, just a little sad. “It’s a piece of advice from the man who loves you.”

 

==

 

“This is stupid,” Darcy declares, tossing her pen down onto the podium in Judge English’s courtroom. It clatters, spins sideways, and falls onto the floor. She glares at it like it’s maybe the pen’s fault. “Also, we need better pens.”

Clint sighs and resists his urge to shove his glasses out of the way and rub the bridge of his nose. By all accounts, he should be a fan of Fridays—last day of the work week, last day before Phil shows up for the weekend, last chance to clear his desk of the piles of folders that’re always waiting for him lately—but today, he’s spent the whole day fighting off one hell of a headache. He’d felt it creeping up during a suppression hearing that morning, and now—an hour after docket and fifteen minutes before a sentencing hearing on a DUI he settled with Fandral last week—he really wants to settle down on his window ledge until the tension unspools from his shoulders.

Darcy’s got other ideas.

Darcy sweeps down to pick up her pen, teetering on her enormous platform heels, and Clint spends a second admiring the fact that she doesn’t stumble and split her skirt right open. She’d swept into the office dressed like a Shonda Rhimes character: bouncy curls, pencil skirt, head-turning curves. Tony, his nose buried in a brief, had almost walked into a doorjamb when he caught a glimpse; Natasha and Pepper had stopped their conversation to stare, mouths hanging open. Clint, for his part, had managed to keep his cool, even as Phil’s favorite intern—Grady? Grant? Garrison?—spilled water down his shirt and sputtered the world’s most awkward “good morning.” 

“Hey, I like it,” Bucky’d defended at lunch, holding up one hand while he sucked hot dog relish off his thumb. They’d opted for the food cart a couple blocks over, one that promised hot dogs, kielbasa, and brats from June through September. Bucky and Steve’d bought one of each, cut them all in half, and settled next to each other on a concrete planter with the food spread out on napkins between them. Clint’d limited himself to only one and a half jokes about sausage-sharing. “Darcy wants to be a rockstar lawyer. Now, she looks the part. Nothing wrong with that.”

“Except that it’s over-compensation,” Steve’d pointed out.

“And that Tony keeps asking if he can have one,” Bruce’d added quietly, and Bucky’d nearly choked to death on bratwurst, he’d laughed so hard.

But now, at three in the afternoon—after Darcy’s clothes turned about a dozen male heads (and two female ones) at traffic docket and Judge English’d politely suggested she invest in “more reasonable heels” the next time she appeared in court—the rockstar lawyer version of Darcy is wilting. She stabs her pen into her legal pad, scratching out one of her notes, and Clint shoves his hands in his pockets. He’s leaning against the jury box and trying to stay out of her way as she finds her footing, but it’s hard.

He still remembers his first-ever experience as a prosecuting attorney, a little over a year ago. Wade Wilson probably remembers it, too.

“This is dumb,” Darcy informs him as she scribbles something new onto the pad. She draws out the last word, almost transforming it into a little sing-song, but Clint hears the nerves that rattle underneath.

He smiles a little. “It’s good practice.”

“But also dumb.” She rests her elbows on the podium. “Want me to do it again, oh guru of all things related to criminal sentences?”

“No, I want you to tell me why the defendant shouldn’t get probation.”

Darcy rolls her eyes at him, and he watches her body tight as he pushes away from the jury box and crosses toward her. As a trial assistant, she’s the most reliable person in the building—Clint likes Pepper, Jane, and Peggy, sure, but the only one he _knows_ will never drop the ball on him is Darcy—but as an intern, she’s scattered and brimming with nervousness. 

He stands right in front of the podium. “Seriously, tell me why Greg Standridge shouldn’t get probation.”

“If you want me to do it again, you just have to—”

“I don’t want you to read the canned crap you wrote upstairs in the office,” he interrupts, and her glare softens into something like confusion. “I keep making you redo this ‘cause you’re stiff. This isn’t that language with the flags where every bent elbow means something. This is like acrobatics. You’ve gotta be loose.”

Darcy’s frown deepens. “Did you really just compare trial advocacy to flag semaphore?”

“Is that the thing with the flags?”

“Yes.”

“Then yeah.” She scoffs at him, a little snort that sounds a lot like laughter, and Clint grins. “Come on,” he goads. “Greg Standridge. Third DUI in two years. Why don’t we want him on probation?”

“Uh, you just told me why.” She flicks her wrist in a way that reminds Clint of Stark, but when he raises his eyebrows at her, she heaves a sigh. “Fine, okay,” she says, raising her hands. “He doesn’t respect the law. He doesn’t care about his own well-being or anybody else’s. He was twice the legal limit and he spent the first three days after his arrest in the hospital because his car landed in a ditch.”

Clint works very hard to keep his face neutral while he nods, aware that Darcy’s watching him for the slightest hint of approval. He rolls his lips together, allowing her a couple seconds to gather her thoughts back up. “He’s got a job,” he points out, and he watches as confusion flashes across her face. “Look at the statute. Factors for getting probation instead of jail time includes if the defendant has a job, if he has a support system, if he’s got obligations—” 

“And his obligations to not run other people off the road are, what, chopped liver?” she demands. Her fingers curl around the sides of the podium, and Clint feels the corner of his mouth tick up into the start of a smile. “He’s switched jobs three times since his last DUI, so it’s not like he’s some model citizen with a steady job and a life who just happened to mess up once,” she presses. “It’s pretty obvious that if you give the guy access to a car and a bottle of Jack, this is where we end up. He needs more than just a probation officer looming over his shoulder to keep out of trouble. Because next time, it might not just be _him_ in the ditch.”

He steps back from the podium, a grin overtaking his face. Darcy blinks at him, surprised for a second, and then scowls and flips him off. “You are such a smug asshole!” she accuses, and Clint bursts out laughing. Darcy throws her pen at him and only narrowly misses. “You know I can’t talk to the judge like that, right?”

“Why not?”

“Uh, because she’ll hold me in contempt of court for calling the defendant a less-than-model citizen?” 

“So leave that part out,” he replies, and she rolls her eyes at him. He shakes his head. “You’ve gotta stop looking at everything you do in front of the judge as, like performance art,” he tells her. “You know how often Phil writes out his whole opening and closing?”

She kicks one of the vinyl chairs away from the defense table and drops into it. “Probably every time.”

“More like none of the time,” Clint returns. He rests his ass on the State’s counsel table while Darcy frowns at him. “He writes a lot of notes, and he runs a lot of language in front of a mirror to make sure nothing in his head sounds weird aloud,” he clarifies. “But he’s not reading off a notecard or anything. He’s just telling a story.”

She leans her head back against the chair and unbuttons her suit jacket. Her dark green top shimmers under the fluorescent lights. “You know your ode to your boyfriend isn’t exactly a confidence builder, right?”

He crosses his arms over his chest. “He’s one of the best attorneys in our office, you know.”

“Yeah, and he’s still your boyfriend.” He chuckles a little, shaking his head, but he realizes after a couple seconds that she’s watching him carefully. “How’s that whole thing going?”

“My relationship?” 

“The long-distance part of it, yeah.” He rolls his eyes at her, but Darcy just scoots her chair across the well of the courtroom so she can lightly kick him in the shin. “It can’t be fun,” she points out, and when he frowns, she waves a hand. “The long-distance thing. Having your personal hunk of man-meat a plane ride away.”

“I thought you never wanted to hear about my sex life.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear about your, you know, _you_ life.” He cocks his head at her, and she sighs. “You and Phil are kind of the perfect team. I mean, it’s codependent and unhealthy—”

“Says the woman who competes with her boyfriend at trivia.”

“—but you guys are sort of— I don’t know, you’re a force of nature.” She shrugs and lets her head thump back against the vinyl. “It’s weird, not seeing you together and disgustingly happy.”

He snorts. “We’re not disgustingly happy.”

“You guys are a Lifetime Original Movie,” she returns, and he rolls his eyes again. She kicks him in retaliation hard enough that he swears under his breath. “The sad lawyer from the wrong side of the tracks—”

“I can fire you, you know.”

“—meets the charming Chief Assistant District Attorney, and they weather the storm together until they, I don’t know, get alien-pregnant and raise a family of creepy green babies or something.” He laughs, and she flashes him an award-winning smile. “You’re not the worst boss I’ve had,” she says after another couple seconds, and he’s surprised at the honesty in her voice and, more than that, in her face. “I don’t want to have to babysit you through another emotional crisis in order to keep you.”

He smirks. “You know my apartment manager thought you were my girlfriend for two weeks because of the Maroon 5 thing, right?” 

Darcy grins. “You could do worse,” she retorts, and slides the chair back to the defense table.

After the hearing—where Greg Standridge is successfully sentenced to six months’ jail time, a fact that excites Darcy to the point where she nearly high-fives Clint right there in open court—Clint putters around the building and ties up as many loose ends from the week as he can. He celebrates Darcy’s first in-court success with a couple cinnamon candies from Pepper’s secret stash first, of course, but then it’s all working: amending tickets, reading police reports, signing motions to dismiss, you name it. It’s almost five by the time he finishes it all, and he practically vaults the steps in sets of three or four to run them down to the clerk’s office before the end of business.

He emerges empty-handed and a little proud of himself, his sleeves rolled up and jacket abandoned in his office, to find a familiar figure leaning against one of the walls in the hallway. She’s dressed again in navy blue slacks and a polo shirt, her dark hair loose around her shoulders; if she notices him, she keeps it to herself as she fiddles with her phone. Clint glances at his watch, then at the concentration on her face, and finally rolls his lips together.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says, and Kate Bishop leaps away from the wall like she’s been stung.

They stare at each other across the empty hallway before the girl finally unruffles her feathers enough to shove her phone in her back pocket and shrug. “You’re a high school kid,” he presses, and she scoffs. “Go, I don’t know, find a Kate Spade outlet or something.”

Her hands fall to her hips as she scowls. “Is that what you did when you were in high school?” 

“No, I shot old cans with a crossbow, but I didn’t have money.” Kate rolls her eyes, but he thinks he catches her fighting a smile. He glances at the clock again—it’s ticking down toward five, but it’s not there yet—and then back to her. “Did you come straight from school?”

“Pretty much,” she admits, slipping her hands into her back pockets. “I finished up my last final, promised Principal Hand I’d stay out of trouble—”

“Before you headed straight into it by coming here,” Clint points out.

“—and met a friend here for a soda.” He blinks, and she sighs at him. “You know there’s a cafeteria in this building, right? Crappy sandwiches, Fritos, and the cheapest 32-ounce Dr. Pepper in the county?” When he presses his lips together, her eyebrows shoot up. “You don’t think I have friends?”

“I don’t think most teenagers hang out with their friends in courthouse cafeterias,” he returns. She flips her hair over her shoulder, but something like embarrassment settles across her expression. No, embarrassment’s softer, something that lingers in the corners of the eyes; what races across Kate’s face is quiet and secretive, and the longer Clint studies it, the further he is from naming it. He finally just asks, “And then you crept around looking for me?”

Her face bursts into a grin. “Don’t flatter yourself. This floor just has the best bathrooms.”

“Really?”

“Really, Barton. You’re nothing special.” She winks at him, and Clint finally gives into a grin of his own. Kate’s own smile grows, and she closes the distance between them to slug him lightly in the shoulder. “Seriously,” she says, “you’re lame.”

“You keep talking to me,” he observes, and she snorts at him. “Just saying.”

“It’s not like I’ve got an abundance of not-awful, not-lame adults in my life.” Clint feels something coil in his gut, a surge of protectiveness he’s not used to. “You make the cut if you don’t also suck.”

He shakes his head at her. “You’re not the first person to say that to me, today.”

“As long as you don’t let it get to your head,” she retorts, and he barks a laugh. She smiles for a second, but then turns nervous, shifting her weight from one foot to another. “And,” she says after a couple more seconds, “I wanted to say thanks. For, you know, Monday.”

Clint shrugs. “Just doing my job.”

Kate rolls her eyes. “Your job involves hanging out with teenagers after people publically call them a cu—”

“My job involves doing what’s right.” She ducks her head and he shoves his hands in his pockets. “No matter what.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, and raises her eyes to briefly meet his, “that didn’t suck, either.”

“I try,” he replies, shrugging, and Kate laughs when she punches him in the arm again.

He’s not sure which one of them officially ends the conversation after that, but it’s after five when he heads back up the back staircase to the office and finds the place nearly deserted. He screws around for the first couple minutes, chatting a little with Bruce and Thor about some pending child welfare legislation he definitely couldn’t care less about. He tries not to think about Kate Bishop and the secrets she’d hidden by ducking her face away and punching him in the arm, but it’s a spectacular failure.

He’s about to walk back to his own office and pack up for the weekend when Thor lays a hand on his shoulder. “Your heart is not still heavy about Miss Bishop’s case, is it?” he asks, but Clint knows from his tone that he already knows the answer.

He forces a smile anyway. “My heart’s mostly just hungry,” he replies, and Thor laughs before releasing him.

Darcy’s already abandoned her post by the time Clint walks by her cubicle, and he resists the urge to grin at how she’s left her ridiculous shoes underneath her desk. His own desk is a mess, a pile of paperwork and folders that desperately needs a good half-hour of organization, but he’s not sure he cares. His headache’s threatening to return, his body feels tight, and he really wants to head home to beer, leftover pizza, and his damn cat.

And, in the morning, his damn boyfriend.

When he rounds the desk to shut off his computer, though, he finds a manila folder sitting on the keyboard. There’s one of those bigger post-it notes with the lines stuck in the middle of it, and he’s forced to turn on an extra lamp to read Darcy’s sparkly blue pen on the neon-pink paper.

_Bossman:_

_Here are the school records for those kids Bishop beat up. Not sure what you’re hoping to find, unless their lung health matters to you or something._

_\- Darcy, the greatest trial assistant slash intern ever_

_(PS: Thanks for today.)_

Clint almost pulls out his cell phone and texts her about that stupid nickname, but then that part of his brain that’s way too focused on Kate Bishop’s case wins over and he flips the folder open. He sits heavily on the window ledge as he starts pawing through the pages, all of them a little blurry thanks to the office’s ancient fax machine.

But the problem with the school records isn’t the crappy fax job. Instead, it’s that every one of the five boys Kate Bishop attacked at that party, from Evan to Cody and back again, is squeaky clean.

Well, no. All five have been suspended at one point for stupid teenage bullshit: Brandon got caught with half a joint in his pocket; a verbal altercation during a basketball game led to Dylan throwing a punch at a rival point guard; Cody and Devan hazed a freshman soccer player by filling his cleats with pet store crickets. And, according to the records, the boys all smoke, leading to about seven instances of confiscated cigarettes in the last year.

But none of them have ever got caught defacing school property.

Aside from the mutual combat at the basketball game, none of them have ever started even a loud argument at school.

And not a single one of them has, at least on paper, ever interacted with Kate Bishop.

Clint reads and re-reads their records, searching futilely for clues between the lines of crappy sans-serif font. By the time he balls up the sheets and throws them into the recycle bin, his eyes hurt from squinting and his mind is racing, thoughts all tumbling over one another until they’re nothing but a big ball of mush.

He feels like an idiot as he shuts down his computer and grabs his bag. He’d expected to discover all the answers to Kate’s case in those five sheets of paper, to uncover the secret beginnings of her fear and shame so he could finally solve them. Now, standing in his office and staring down at the blue bin next to his desk, he’s struck with the realization that there _is_ no mysterious beginning to Kate’s case. There’s no rhyme or reason to the fight she started at that party, no hidden link between her anger, the graffiti in the school hallway, and the vibrant girl he met a little under a year earlier.

He kicks the bin over on his way out of his office, and the door shudders in the jamb behind him.

When he bounds down the stairs in twos and threes this time, it’s in hope that he can escape the judicial complex and maybe, just _maybe_ , escape Kate Bishop as well.

He drops his bag and jacket in the front hallway and starts shedding clothes on his way to the bedroom, Sandy following after him and mewing her usual greetings. He leaves his slacks in a pile on the floor as he tugs on shorts and a tank. She lays in the pant leg until he starts lacing up his running shoes, then attacks his fingers until he’s finished tying them. The early June evening is damp, the humidity so high that it’s nearly misting, and he plunges through the thick summer air at a punishing pace. He runs down their street until he hits a hill, then races up it; when he reaches the top, he cuts past the doughnut shop he and Phil love and into a nearby park, circling past a pee-wee soccer team and a half-dozen kids climbing all over the playground while their parents watch from nearby benches.

Clint wonders whether Kate Bishop ever teetered at the top of the jungle gym before dropping to hang upside down.

Then, he wonders if _he_ ever did the same, and he runs even faster.

His lungs burn and his legs ache by the time he shoves back through the front door, the setting sun throwing long fingers of pink and gold light across the living room floor. He drops onto the rug, panting and sweat-sticky, and lets Sandy rub up against his hand. When he closes his eyes, it’s to a sea of half-imagined moments: Kate Bishop in the September wind, Barney laughing in the front seat of the truck as they drove to rob that fucking convenience store, red spray paint on navy blue lockers, Phil’s eyes shining at him from his half-dark hotel room. He rubs a hand over his face, dragging through sweat and stubble.

“Don’t you dare repeat this,” he tells the cat, “but Phil might’ve been right about this case.”

Sandy stretches to rub her head against his fingertips, purring like a motor, and he closes his eyes a second time. 

 

==

 

Clint wakes up Saturday morning from a series of disconnected, cloudy dreams to the weight and heat of an arm snaking across his waist. He fumbles against the rumpled sheets, his drowsy fingers clumsy and groping until he finds Phil’s hand. The comfort’s so real, so _familiar_ , that he sighs long and hard.

“Don’t get up,” Phil jokes, and Clint rolls in his grip until they’re facing each other and tangles their ankles together. His hands roam up the length of Phil’s sides, and Phil’s face brightens in a tiny, warm smile. “Not,” he adds, “that I wanted you out of bed.”

“I’m never gonna let you out of bed,” Clint threatens, and in the half-awake haze of the morning, he leans in and kisses Phil. It’s meant as a greeting, but Phil sighs softly against his mouth and transforms it something else: a promise, a curse, a desperate hand-hold on reality. The whole week melts away as they fumble together, groping for their normal rhythm until Clint’s pressing his whole body into Phil’s and demanding more touch.

He’d dreamed of sentencing arguments and darkness, he recalls as he drags Phil’s jean-clad thigh between his own and pulls Phil halfway on top him. He’d dreamed of clean-cut boys with pristine criminal records and deceptive smiles, and of Kate Bishop fleeing from them down a shadowy hallway.

When Phil shoves fingers into his hair, he keens and breaks the kiss. He rests his nose besides Phil’s for a second, almost panting, before his fingers fist in Phil’s shirt and drag him down for another greedy kiss.

“Clint,” Phil says, but the name gets lost in between their kisses. Clint tangles a leg around the back of his and pulls him closer. He shoves his hands under Phil’s shirt, but Phil catches his wrists. He tugs his hands up and away, pinning them to the pillow. “Clint,” he says again, more firmly, and Clint notices the stony coolness in his eyes. 

They watch each other, tangled in the sheets, until Phil wets his lips. His voice is hardly louder than a whisper when he asks, “Are you all right?”

For a few seconds, Clint can only think about the last couple weeks: about Jessica Jones’s seriousness and Kate Bishop’s kaleidoscope moods, about shiny-haired lawyers and publishing magnets in expensive business suits. He pictures perfect school records, ten-page diversion agreements, dark Katniss-style braids, and purple Volkswagens. 

He’s spent weeks chasing the beginnings of a case only to find that he’s at the end of it, a snake eating its own tail.

He can’t run after a shadow. Not anymore.

Phil loosens his grip, and Clint immediately reaches up to card his fingers through the soft hair on the back of Phil’s neck. He pulls him down, closer by inches until their foreheads rest together. He closes his eyes and breathes Phil in, drinking in his warmth and his nearness until he thinks he might drown in him.

“Clint,” Phil says again, softer.

“I’m fine,” Clint answers. When he opens his eyes, the only thing he can see is Phil. “For the first time in the last couple weeks, I’m actually fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This weekend is an extended-length [Motion Practice Friday, the day that I answer real questions from real Motion Practitioners](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/76599601513/its-motion-practice-friday).
> 
> Also, I am woefully behind on comments, and I apologize. I meant to hit them this week but I am very close to finishing Diversions and I ended up working on the story rather than on comments. I hope you will forgive me based solely on that bit of information. I will likely tackle them this weekend.


	10. Good People, Bad Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, Clint wonders why people who don’t deserve hell end up forced through it. Problem is, that’s a question with no answer whatsoever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, as always, to my super-awesome beta-reading star ladies, Jen and saranoh. I once again poked the story after they worked their magic. Any errors continue to be my own train wreck.

“Yeah, your way of prepping cases is still stupid,” Darcy Lewis says three weeks later, and Clint can’t help but grin at her. It’s an unfamiliar expression, and Darcy looks surprised for a second before she smiles back and starts scratching notes down on her legal pad.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon and the two of them are bunkered down in Judge Brassels’s old-fashioned courtroom, the painted faces from the mural staring down at the two of them as Darcy prepares for her first ever direct-examination during a trial. Clint’s pretty proud of her progress, really—since the sentencing hearing, she’s tackled a day of first appearances with Steve, a jury selection with Natasha, presented the factual basis for three different plea hearings in front of Judge English, _and_ called half of last Friday’s traffic docket—but she’s still stiff and unnatural, reading all her questions like a robot. The trial they picked up is out of the pile Phil left behind and involves a twenty-something who burglarized ten cars in the train station parking lot.

The detective Darcy’s scheduled to question has fifteen years of experience and one of the cleanest police reports Clint’s ever read. He swears that heavenly choirs sing every time he so much as skims the damn thing.

But Darcy keeps phrasing her questions like she’s waiting to be surprised by the answer, and it’s starting to drive Clint a little crazy.

Then again, everything’s driven him at least a little crazy in the past three weeks.

“Start over again at what happened when the detectives showed up on scene,” he instructs Darcy. She waves a hand at him as she finishes up whatever thought she’s grappling with, and Clint leans back in the cheap witness stand chair and drags his phone out.

He checks the notification screen, finds no new texts or e-mails, and shoves it back in his pocket. He presses his palm against it and wills it to buzz.

Then Darcy asks, “What did you observe when you arrived back at the train station?”, and he’s forced back into the moment.

They spend a good hour running through Darcy’s direct examination, tightening up her questions until they run like a well-oiled machine, and by the end of their practice, she’s armed with a whole extra page of maybe-questions depending on what falls out of the good detective’s mouth. Clint tries to be helpful, tugging critiques out of thin air and purposely omitting details so she’ll ask him follow-ups, but his mind wanders. He touches his phone over and over again, like a kid picking at a scab until it bleeds. Darcy pretends not to notice, her eyebrow quirking at his answers instead of his weird little tics, and he assumes after the hour’s up that he’s gotten away with it.

But when he hands her back the police report, she rests a hand on a curvy hip. “He finds out today if he has to work over the weekend, doesn’t he?” she asks, her tone _barely_ lifting enough for it to count as a question.

Clint rolls his eyes. “You need to stop reading my e-mails.”

“I’m not reading your e-mails, I’m reading your face,” she retorts. She snatches the report from him. “More witness interviews this time?”

He tries to snort and roll his eyes again, but her piercing gaze wins out. He shakes his head. “They find out this afternoon whether they win the motion for rehearing on the blood evidence. If they don’t, they’re appealing to the Tenth Circuit.”

She frowns. “And what’s that mean for this whole special prosecution gig of his?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Clint, you have to give me better than—”

“Darcy,” he cuts her off, dragging a hand through his hair, “I actually don’t know.” He tries to force a little smile, but he knows it’s nothing more than a twitch in the corner of his mouth. “Good work today. I’ll see you back upstairs and we can talk about voir dire.”

She sighs softly. “Clint—”

“I’ll be up in ten,” he promises, and walks out of the courtroom and into the mostly-empty afternoon hallway.

The back stairwell is empty when bangs through the doors, and he climbs about halfway up before sitting on the landing and scrubbing his palm over his face. He knows Darcy won’t follow, and he basks in the quiet and the dim, yellow light. But then, he remembers other afternoons sitting on the stairs, his thigh pressed against Phil’s and a statute book balanced between them, and he wants to scream until all he hears are the echoes of his own voice.

He leans his shoulder against the wall and closes his eyes, instead.

It’s not Phil’s fault that the Novak case has turned into a flaming pile of horseshit, or that the work keeps piling up around him, but back home in Suffolk County, it almost feels that way. The week after the Holy Trinity vandal struck, Novak’s attorney’d filed a motion to suppress a bunch of evidence, and as it happened, his accusations of local police misconduct’d landed right on the money. Phil’d spent the entire week in and out of witness interviews, building and burning bridges with local law enforcement as he and Blake tried to identify the line between reality and clever defense work—and then, he’d spent most the weekend locked in the office, writing and rewriting the prosecution’s response motion. Clint’d watched from the hallway, the kitchen, or the couch as Phil’d written a draft, sent them to Blake, argued for an hour on the phone about it, and then started over from scratch. He’d cooked meals, delivered beers, and dragged Phil into their bed both Saturday and Sunday nights, but nothing’d helped. Phil’d transformed into a man possessed, and when he woke Clint up to kiss him goodbye on Monday morning, he’d murmured apologies so sweet and sad that Clint’d almost dragged him down and demanded he stay.

He’d spent the better part of that next week incommunicado, texting Clint between meetings and hearings and calling him for short, to-the-point updates on the case—and all of his and Blake’s good works.

On Friday, Phil’d argued the motion. On Saturday, he’d arrived home, preoccupied but human. They’d spent most of Saturday in bed and Sunday working, but Clint’d thought maybe, just _maybe_ , order’d been restored to his life.

Then, on the Wednesday of last week, the district court’d suppressed a bunch of blood evidence from the scene of Novak’s crime, and life’d blown up in Clint and Phil’s faces.

Or at least, Phil’s life’d blown up in their faces, because since the court’d ruled, Clint’s barely spoken to the guy for more than a fifteen-minute stretch, contenting himself with quickie midday phone calls during rushed lunches or last-minute goodnights well after midnight. Phil’d spent the last weekend in Denver, working through more interviews and a motion for rehearing. If they win it and the district court’s willing to revisit its ruling, he’ll show up at home on Saturday morning.

If not, and they start a fucking _appeal_ —

Clint knocks his head against the cinderblock wall a couple times, hard enough that his teeth rattle. It’s not Phil’s fault, he reminds himself. He’s not enjoying it out there, he’s not having extra _fun_ with Blake, he’s just doing a job. A job that keeps him away and distracted, a job where Clint’s bed might be empty for two weeks straight, a job where Clint feels every damn morning like he’s missing a limb because the guy who wakes him up with his fancy coffee isn’t there, and where—

“I’m not sure you have the spare brain cells for that,” a familiar voice chides, and he opens his eyes to find Natasha standing on the landing exactly one flight below him. In the dim light, her red top looks almost the same shade as her hair.

He scrubs a hand over his face again. “How’d you get halfway up in _heels_ and still not make a sound?”

“I’m Russian—or at least, I used to be,” she answers, and he snorts at her. She climbs the last eight stairs before dropping to sit next to him. She sets her legal pad on her lap and then rests her elbows on it. “Heard from Phil?”

He rolls his eyes at her. “Does everyone in our office know _everything_ about the Novak case?”

“If the news doesn’t broadcast it, your lousy mood does.” He glances away, picking at his cuticle when she asks, “Am I wrong?”

“Can my answer involve how you’re too good at reading people?” 

“No.”

“Then I’m taking the fifth.” She chuckles a little, and he drops back to lean on his elbows. Above him, the staircase spirals up another four flights—three for the floors, one for the roof—and he stares up at the distant ceiling. “Is it crazy that it’s the timing that bugs me?” 

She tips her head at him. “The timing?”

“Yeah,” he replies, shrugging. “It’s like— I dump my place, we move in together, whatever, and as soon as the dust settles from that, his old buddy shows up and drags him away to six weeks in Denver.” He shakes his head. “We’re in the sixth week, you know,” he says, and when Natasha presses her lips into a tiny frown, he realizes she’s already counted down the days, herself. Then again, with all the unfinished felony cases on Maria’s desk and the recent bump in stupid misdemeanors—Bucky’s usual fare—Clint’s pretty sure the whole office’s waiting for Phil to come home. “The woman who’s on maternity leave bumped it out for another week—I guess she’s got some vacation time she’s using, I don’t know—and he’s staying at least through the end of _next_ week. And meanwhile, I’m lucky to get ten minutes a night.”

Natasha spares him a small smile. “He’s not hiding from you, if that’s what you think.” When he rolls his eyes, she lightly kicks his ankle. “Correlation isn’t causation.”

He tries to kick her back, but she slides her ankle out of the way. “You’re spending too much time with Bruce,” he warns her.

“I’d be spending less time with him if you’d come out with us,” she returns, and he pushes himself back into a proper sitting position. When he folds his hands and drops them between his thighs, she sighs at him. “You can’t spend the next ten days closed up in the house, Clint,” she presses. “Loving someone sometimes means missing them—and still living your life in the meantime.”

“This from the woman who takes vacations with her girlfriend.”

“Pepper’s not the only person I’ve ever loved,” she returns sharply. He presses his lips together, but she just shakes her head. “I’ve been in serious relationships over long distances. If you spend long enough second-guessing everything, you end up with nothing.”

“And you know this from experience?”

“I know most things from experience,” she replies, and unfolds her hands to push herself up to standing. She steps up onto the landing above Clint’s head and then hesitates, free hand around the bannister. “Come out with Bruce and me tonight,” she says, and he glances away. “Have a beer or two, eat awful nachos, listen to stories about Miles and Ganke building a Lego Death Star. It’ll be good for you.”

He stares at his own hands before he shrugs. “I’ll think about it,” he replies, and then listens to her footfalls as they echo up through the stairwell and, finally, disappear.

He emerges from the darkness another three or four minutes later, unsurprised to find Darcy buried in other work while bitching loudly to Jane about how he’s the “mopiest boss ever.” Clint stands just outside Darcy’s periphery while she complains and Jane subtly slashes a hand across her own throat; when Darcy finally puts two and two together, she blushes as red as her nail polish and calls Jane a polite bastard, whatever that means. Clint lets her stew as he fetches a cup of coffee, and then they spend another twenty-five minutes in his office, poring over jury selection questions and talking a little more about the morning’s trial. She leaves him there, sitting on the window ledge with his legal pad on his knee, to run through his opening statement in his head a few times.

Except Clint sits there and stares out at the parking lot instead, his head lulled back against the wall and his eyes half-hooded. When his phone finally buzzes, he knocks two pillows and his pad off the ledge, swearing under his breath as he gropes around for his phone.

“Just because Phil’s living the high life—and I hope you see what I did there—doesn’t mean you should turn your pillow palace into a masturbation station,” Tony calls from just outside his doorway, and Clint at least manages to flip him off before he finds the damn thing. The screen’s already dimmed from the incoming text message, and he feels his chest tighten as he presses the home button to display his notifications.

**Phil Coulson:** _The judge wants a full rehearing on Monday—meaning I’ll see you first thing Saturday morning. Hopefully still in bed. Which is where I’d like to be right now._

When Clint’s heart stops hammering and he glances up, he finds Tony hovering in the threshold to his office. He raises both eyebrows, almost like he’s waiting for a comeback, so Clint flashes him his toothiest grin. “Just for that crack,” he comments, “we’re making out on your porch swing at this weekend’s barbeque. With _tongue_.”

“Just for that, my husband’s coming shirtless,” Tony retorts, and Clint realizes how right Natasha’s been about his lousy mood when the guy grins back at him. 

 

==

 

“You know,” Clint comments, his suit jacket tucked in the strap of his bag as he stands a couple feet behind the park bench, “you spend enough time creeping around a playground, people look at you funny.”

“Yeah, but I’m not a middle-aged man, so I’m probably safe,” Kate Bishop retorts, and flips another page in her book.

To be fair—or at least, as fair as any guy Clint’s age with a distant boyfriend and a crazy job can be—he’d left Kate alone the first couple times he’d noticed her in the park by the judicial complex, her purple Volkswagen parked crookedly in the back corner of the lot. She’d appeared on a Tuesday, then again on a Friday, each time wearing summery clothes and armed with a book. She’s reading now, a different paperback than last time, and there’s a big fake flower tucked in her twisted-up hair. With cutoff shorts and a tank-top, she looks like a college student paging through some kinda summer reading, not a bored high school kid with another empty month ahead of her.

She twists around to peer at him over the tops of her sunglasses. “You look like a creeper,” she informs him curtly.

“And you don’t?” he retorts.

She shrugs. “Maybe I’m just an innocent Girl Scout earning my babysitting merit badge.”

“I don’t think Girl Scouts call them merit badges.”

“And your creepy factor increases by ten because you know that,” Kate returns dryly, and he laughs. 

She rolls her eyes at him and turns back to her book, but he knows from the line of her shoulders that she’s not really reading it. No, she’s waiting for more banter, their usual song-and-dance about how she needs better hobbies and how he needs looser pants. Clint’s thought a few times in the last couple weeks that he’s caught glimpses of the real Kate Bishop, wind-swept and clever, peeking out from behind the expensive sunglasses and thick books.

Other times, he’s caught deep sadness racing across her expression, and watched as she’s shoved her book back in her bag and run off.

But when he stands there in the grass this time, he’s suddenly exhausted. He misses Phil out of nowhere, a pain that sweeps through him and steals his breath, and then, he misses other things too: his friends, his brother, his usual sense of self. 

Kate jerks her head up violently when he sits next to her on the park bench. “You’re breaking script,” she warns him. 

He shrugs. “Maybe I wanted to hear about how you don’t know what Girl Scouts call their badges.”

She rolls her eyes. “Like I was allowed to be in Girl Scouts,” she returns, closing her book. He raises his eyebrows at her “There’s no time for scouting when you’re in private lessons for just about everything,” she explains. “Piano, fencing, cello, martial arts, flute, archery—”

Clint blinks. “Archery?”

“And not with some crappy crossbow, either,” she returns immediately. He shakes his head at her, almost laughing, and she screws her face up in a scowl. “There is no unscheduled time in the Bishop household.”

“Except at five in the afternoon on a Wednesday,” he points out.

“Like the Beach Boys said, I’ll do whatever the hell I want until Daddy takes my Beetle away.” Clint laughs for real this time, and Kate crosses her arms over her chest in what he assumes is total teenage indignation. “Don’t _you_ have better things to do? A nerdy boyfriend to climb like a tree? Something?”

“He’s in Denver,” Clint answers, shrugging again. “And who said my boyfriend was nerdy?” 

She waves a hand. “Wade did. I saw him trying to scale some guy in the parking lot a week ago. Tight clothes, lots of shoulders.” Clint rolls his eyes, and she peers at him over the tops of her shades. “That’s not what you’re into, is it? You know, the whole—” She uncrosses her arms to hold them out like a body-builder might, all puffed-out chest and cheeks. “—thing?”

He grins at her. “ _Definitely_ not,” he promises. “And he’s not _that_ nerdy. Wade just thinks he is. We work together.”

Her gaze narrows slightly. “But he’s also in Denver?”

“He’s working as a special prosecutor for a friend of his,” he replies. Kate keeps staring at him, suspicious, so forces a smile and nods toward her bag. “Still on that dragon book, or whatever?”

“I read a book with a dragon on the cover _once_ ,” she chides, shaking her head. “And for the record, no, it’s not a ‘dragon book.’”

“You never seemed like a dragon kind of girl,” he says without thinking. She looks surprised for a half-second, but he just shrugs. “I just mean, you’re not like the kids who hang out in their basements and play—”

“I’m not, but Teddy’s weirdly into fantasy.”

“Teddy?”

She nods almost distractedly, her face turned away as she watches some kids on the playground. “I think Billy roped him into it, honestly, but he won’t say. He just started bringing these books to group for me, and they don’t all suck.” She snorts a little before tossing Clint an over-the-shoulder glance. “Better than the romance novels Cassie always recommends. Lords ripping the bodices off their loyal ladies, _total_ trash.”

He grins at her. “My book club forced me into _Fifty Shades of Gray_ ,” he admits, and then he laughs at her horrified, gaping stare.

She elbows him, jabbing him firmly between the ribs and rolling her eyes when he huffs a breath like she’s forced the wind out of him. She untucks her legs and dangles them under the bench. “My school’s full of all these pretentious assholes who think they’re better because they have money,” she says. “At group, it’s different. Nobody cares if you have money, or a functional family, or anything like that. They just care about _you_.”

Clint nods a little, not saying anything, and Kate slowly starts coiling back in on herself, picking at her nail polish. “Is that why you have trouble at school?”

She snorts. “That’s a pretty broad term there, lawyer-guy.”

“Well, I don’t know how deep it all runs.” She rolls her eyes, and he watches her before he pulls in a breath. “I just know that there was that fight and the spray paint. I didn’t know if it was all connected.”

Kate freezes, her whole body tensing like she’s bracing for impact. He swears he can hear her swallow. “Don’t.”

He frowns. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t make _this_ about _that_.” When she glances at him, there’s something small and frightened hiding in her eyes, and he feels a lump rise in his throat. She drops her hands to the edge of the bench and curls her fingers against the wood. “Your big blond friend called and explained to my dad that they still don’t know who painted that shit at school—fine with me, by the way—and now you—”

“They can’t find him because nobody’s helped them.” Kate scoffs, and there’s bitterness in the sound. Clint twists to face her fully. “You can’t tell me this was an isolated incident, or that you got into a fight just for the hell of it. You’re the only person who knows what’s going on, and if you _tell_ me, we can—”

“You know, I just remembered _why_ we have a script for these things,” Kate cuts him off, and immediately reaches for her bag. She moves quickly but stiffly, and her book tumbles into the dirt as she rockets to her feet. Clint bends to collect the book—it’s _The House on Mango Street_ , battered and dog-eared like it’s been read a thousand times—but she snatches it out of his grip. “I come here to read,” she informs him curtly, “not to talk about _things_. I do enough of that with Jess and my group, I don’t need to do it you, too.”

“Nobody comes to the park outside the judicial complex to read.” Her eyes flash, suddenly dark and angry, but then she flips her sunglasses back down onto her nose. “Kate, I want to help you, not to—”

“Has it ever occurred to you that I don’t need help?” she shoots back as she slings her bag over her shoulder. “I don’t come here for your whole truth, justice, American way schtick, you know.”

“Then what _do_ you come here for?” Clint demands. She tosses her head, and he barely resists rolling his eyes at her. “You’re off the hook, you realize that? Your case is closed unless you screw something up, the graffiti won’t be prosecuted if you don’t open up about it, you’re _free_. And instead of running around with your friends all summer, you’re reading in a park outside a courthouse. Alone.” 

She crosses her arms over her chest. “You don’t know anything,” she says, her voice low and acidic. “And you definitely don’t know me.”

“Kate—” he starts to say, but he knows immediately that he’s spoken too late. She turns on her heel and stalks away, walking around the back of the bench and a tree to avoid standing any closer to him than is necessary. He presses his lips together, the words swirling around in the back of his mind but somehow never making it down to his lips.

She’s halfway to her car before she pauses. When she twists back around to look at him, her sunglasses slip down on her nose. He’s allowed one glimpse of her eyes before she shoves the glasses back where they belong. “And for the record,” she calls out, her voice ringing out loud and proud in the summer heat, “I’m _not_ the one who’s alone, Mister Denver Boyfriend.”

Clint opens his mouth—and then realizes that she’s right. He stares at her back as she stomps to her car, watching as she tears open the driver’s side door. She tosses her bag on the passenger seat and then disappears into the car; with the sun glinting off the windshield, he can’t see her as much as he can see her silhouette, an unfamiliar, shapeless blotch.

He stares at the blotch for a long time before he finally digs into his bag for his phone. Natasha’s name is about the fourth down on his recently-texted list. _you and bruce want to come over and drink my beer?_ he types as Kate’s Volkswagen roars to life and squeals out of its parking spot. 

_No, we want to come over and drink much better beer than that crap in your fridge_ , she retorts within about twenty seconds, and Clint shakes his head as he promises to stop by the liquor store on his way home.

 

==

 

“You’re kidding, right?” Barney demands, and he punctuates the question with a loud, ugly laugh. “‘Cause you know I don’t do that philosophical bullshit, so you _gotta_ be joking.”

Clint rolls his eyes and grabs across the kitchen table for his beer, but Barney—older brother right down to his core—slides it out of his reach. They glare at each other for a second before Barney raises his eyebrows and tilts his head in a silent challenge. He only relinquishes the bottle when Clint sighs and mutters, “Whatever.” 

He remembers the same kinda shitty sibling posturing back when he was in high school, Barney stealing his cigarettes or pot and hiding them until Clint caved about _something_. One time, Clint’d given in and taken Barney’s GED test for him. Another time, he’d admitted—a little drunk, a little high, and a little desperate for a smoke—that he maybe liked guys.

That second time hadn’t turned out too well for Clint.

Across the table, Barney smirks and crunches down on another slice of pizza.

The whole kitchen smells like pizza, two huge thin-crust pies spread across the kitchen counter along with a thing of cheesy garlic bread and one of those cinnamon stick dessert things, but Clint’s not really hungry. He’d spent his whole Thursday dragging himself through day one of the trial and then, at home, through the backlog of work he’d missed out on doing _because_ of the trial. He’d been so wrapped up in his to-do list that he’d forgotten his plans with his brother until Barney showed up at the door.

He’d looked—and still looks, even after a couple beers and half a pizza—good. He still wears his same old clothes, the edges frayed and the t-shirt torn, but his hair’s clean and out of his face, and for the first time in a long time, he only smells like cigarettes instead of pot. He’d spent the first twenty minutes of their visit bitching about his girlfriend, Ally, but Clint suspects that Ally might be _good_ for Barney.

Well, as good as anybody is for Barney Barton, at least.

Barney belches and leans back in his chair, his arm hooking around the back of it. “So, c’mon, spill the beans,” he goads, and Clint frowns at him. Barney rolls his eyes. “You asked why people do fucked-up things like you don’t got your own experience in that department. Either means that your life as Mister Hot-Shot Attorney’s finally wiped your memory of our fucking nightmare years—”

Clint snorts. “Yeah, that’s it.”

“—or the thing that’s bothering you is the kinda thing your own experience isn’t helping you with.” He knocks back the last of his beer and then lines it up on the table with his other two empties. “Gimme something to work with, maybe I’ll educate you.”

“Because you’re a quality educator.” 

Barney shrugs. “Fact you asked means you wanna know,” he returns, and Clint can’t really argue with that.

He pokes at the last of his pizza and then shoves the plate part of the way down the table, leaving Barney to tilt his head in curiosity like one of Stark’s dogs. The longer Barney stares at him, the more he fidgets, dragging his fingers through his hair and playing with his beer bottle. Truth is, Clint’s not even sure why the question came flying out of his mouth. Barney’d mentioned how a high school friend of his just got yanked off probation and forced to serve his whole term, sure, but that didn’t explain why Clint’s follow-up question had been, _You ever wonder why people pull the fucked-up shit they pull?_

He wants to blame the trial, his pile of unfinished work, or maybe even Phil. Instead, he knows the real reason’s a teenager who reads fantasy novels and _The House on Mango Street_ on park benches and storms off every time the conversation turns serious.

Clint rubs a hand over his face. “It just— Okay, remember back at school, that girl who had a thing for me all through freshman and sophomore years?”

Barney’s whole face lights up when he grins, and again when he laughs at Clint’s eye-roll. “You mean Bobbi Morse?” he presses, and Clint immediately regrets even bringing her up. The regret triples when Barney wolf-whistles. “You did the whole under-the-shirt thing behind the bleachers at that one football game, didn’t you? ‘Cause by that time, you’d stopped tripping over yourself, and we’d told you you’d never get it anywhere else, so—”

“Focus, Barney,” Clint cuts in. He feels his neck warming, but his asshole brother just keeps laughing. He kicks him under the table, Barney kicks back, and for a couple seconds, they’re kids again, wrestling in the common room at the orphanage—or, later, in Trick’s living room—while somebody yells at them about it. He only stops when Barney nearly knocks one of the empty beer bottles off the edge of the table. “My point is, picture a girl like that. Good home life, enough money, smart and together and ready to go places. You know what I mean?”

Barney crosses his arms over his chest. “Yeah, sure.”

“So imagine a girl like that, only she flips out.” His brother squints at him a little. “Flies off the rails, whatever you want to call it. Kicks the shit out of some guys, starts hanging around places she really shouldn’t be—”

“Like?” 

Clint rolls his lips together. He drags out the beat of silence by sipping his beer, because there’s no way in hell he can say _like the judicial complex_. He finally shrugs. “Like, I don’t know, the shitty places you and I used to hang out. Abandoned buildings, vacant lots, that sort of thing.”

“You remember that _you_ never spent much time at any of those places, right?”

“I was there enough, thanks,” Clint counters, and Barney’s mouth kicks up into a shitty little grin. Clint flips him off before he finishes his beer and sets the bottle on the table. Unlike Barney, it’s his only empty. “But my point is, imagine that a girl like Bobbi, who’s mostly got her life together, she _stops_ acting that way.” He leans his arms on the table, folding his hands and picking at a hangnail. “I get why people who grow up with shit all around them do shitty things,” he says after a couple more seconds. “I could write a fucking treatise on that stuff, after everything we went through. But when somebody who’s got everything going for them fly off the handle, it just—” He shakes his head. “You know what I’m talking about?”

When he lifts his eyes, he can catch Barney nodding, but that’s all he really gets for the first few long seconds of silence. They sit at the table until Clint can’t stare aimlessly at the wall anymore, so he rises to start cleaning up the mess of pizza and empty bottles. He’s just about finished packing up the leftovers for Barney—they always order too much and Barney always heads home with whatever’s left—when his brother finally says, “I think you’re looking at it backwards.”

He glances up from the stack of plastic-wrapped slices in time to watch Barney twist in his chair, his arm tossed over the back of it again and his eyes focused in on Clint. Clint’s listened to Phil and a couple other people talk about his eyes—they call them observant and sharp, compare them to the eyes of eagles and hawks—but Clint always wants to say the same about Barney’s eyes. Because when Barney’s clean and sober, his eyes can pierce right through all of Clint’s armor.

He wonders if people who _aren’t_ Barney’s kid brother feel the same way.

“The way I see it,” Barney says, shrugging slightly, “everybody flips out once in a while. Doesn’t matter where they come from or what they’ve seen, they lose control and spin out like when you hit that patch of black ice in Trick’s truck.” Clint snorts and turns back to the pizza, but not before Barney grins at him. “You not gonna remind me that you were fourteen and shouldn’t’ve been driving?”

“Like that’s ever kept you from the story before,” Clint retorts, shaking his head.

“Yeah, but it’s better knowing you did a— What? A 720-degree spin?” Clint rolls his eyes, but he nods. Barney cracks up laughing. “Yeah, see? Better when we know you were just a baby.”

Clint shoves all the leftovers into a plastic grocery bag and then turns to glare at his asshole brother. It only cracks Barney up more. “I thought you had a point with this.”

Barney rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I’m getting there. Fuckin’ lost your patience when you got that law degree, I swear.” Clint leans his hip against the side of the counter, watching as Barney’s expression turns serious. The mirth drops away, and for a second, Clint can imagine that they’re back in Trick’s trailer on one of its rare, cleaner days, the two of them staring at each other across the tiny kitchen and engaging in a real conversation. Granted, most the conversations back then involved Barney’s get-rich-quick scheme of the month or a girl he wanted to hook up with, but Clint’d always felt like maybe he’d have a _life_ someday, back when his brother talked to him like that.

He wishes those Barton boys and these could trade places for a while, just to see.

“Here’s what I know, though, right?” Barney finally asks, swinging to sit sideways on the chair and watch Clint carefully. “Guys like us—at least, guys like the ones we used to be, ‘cause you’re not Li’l B anymore and sometimes, I think maybe I’m not _Big_ B anymore, at least not how I used to be—” He stops short and shakes his head. “Anyway, those kinds of guys, when they flip out, they don’t need a reason. Life’s given them a hundred million reasons, and they’ve bottled them all up inside until they’re full to burstin’, so when they lose it? Could be ‘cause of something that happened right then, could be ‘cause of something that happened ten years ago, it doesn’t matter.”

He pauses, wetting his lips. “But guys like your buddy, or whoever you’re talking about with your whole ‘remember Bobbi Morse with the tits?’ thing, they don’t have that in them. They’re not like dogs who got beat and remember that fear ‘til it comes out at all the wrong times. They’ve always got a reason for losin’ it.” Barney holds Clint’s gaze for a long, silent beat. “And it’s almost always a good one.”

Clint worries his lips together, then tries to force it into a crooked, if half-forced, smile. “Lemme guess,” he says, and Barney raises his chin. “Ally the miracle girlfriend taught you that one.”

Barney snorts at him and rolls his eyes. “No, you fuckin’ dumbass,” he retorts, his voice caught somewhere between laughter and something else, low and equally genuine. “ _You_ taught me that shit.”

 

== 

 

On Saturday morning, Clint mows the lawn.

He scowls at every too-long blade of grass he misses, grumbles at every twig and rock he mows over, and swears when, twice, he kicks the bag lightly to see whether it’s full and the damn thing falls right off the back of the mower. He’d complained around the time he moved in with Phil that they needed a new mower, one that didn’t spit rocks out like heat-seeking missiles into his shin, but he’s still fighting with the same damn one as two months ago.

He tries not curse Phil’s name as he drags the bag of clippings over to the yard waste bin, but he kinda fails.

It’s not Phil’s fault that Clint already hates the weekend at eleven a.m. on Saturday, but he’s not totally innocent, either. The weekend from hell’d started Friday afternoon, when Stark—full of all his usual Stark insanity and wearing a ridiculously shiny gold tie—had popped into his office while he and Darcy were waiting for the jury on their burglary case. He’d glanced between the two of them, almost like he was surprised to catch Clint and his trial assistant eating a late lunch together, and then demanded, “Remind me again how you get the good intern and I go back and forth between the one with the boobs and the one with the personality of a sea monkey.”

“You mean I’m _not_ the one with the boobs?” Darcy’d asked. She’d pulled down her top a couple extra inches to study the full effect of her cleavage, and Clint’d raised a hand up over his eyes. She’d snorted at him. “I’m just saying, I have the boobs to be the one with the boobs.”

“Yeah, but you’re not a sexual harassment seminar waiting to happen and— Okay, _please_ put those away before I decide to drop a couple numbers on the Kinsey scale specifically because of you.” Darcy’d cackled in victory, and when Clint’d finally moved his hand, he’d found Tony staring at the wall. He’d almost commented on marriage mellowing the guy, too, but then Stark’d added, “I just wanted to remind both of you that our belated Fourth of July party—with honorable mentions for the recently-passed birthdays of Sailor Rogers and Spinster Coulson—”

“How’s he a spinster if he has me for a live-in boyfriend?” Clint’d wondered aloud.

“—is Sunday afternoon. Not Saturday, as originally advertised, because apparently picking up the kid from science camp on a timely basis is more important than delicious hamburgers the size of my head.” He’d grinned. “Okay?”

“You’re not the one grilling the delicious hamburgers, are you?” Darcy’d asked, and the grin immediately disappeared. “Because last time—”

“We don’t talk about last time,” Tony’d interrupted, jabbing a finger in her direction. “Last time was a fluke, never to be spoken of again.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Never again,” he’d repeated, and disappeared into the hallway before Darcy’d needled him further.

Darcy’d laughed at that, but Clint’d just poked his sandwich. He’d forgotten about the belated barbeque, filing it away with all the other group events he’d skipped out on with Phil stuck in Denver. But resentment’d rushed up like a tidal wave when he’d thought of sharing Phil with anybody after two full weeks apart, and he’d caught himself shredding the bread crust in irritation.

Darcy’d apparently noticed, too, ‘cause she’d heaved a sigh at him. “You can come for two hours, you drama queen,” she’d chided, and he’d jerked his head up at her. He’d only realized that he was frowning when she’d flicked a chip at him. “You can’t spend all weekend plowing him into the mattress.”

He’d almost smiled. “Who says I’m the one who—”

“Okay, _no_ ,” she’d cut him off, and Clint’d allowed a tiny snort of laughter to escape. Darcy, on the other hand, had balled up her napkin and tossed it onto her empty sandwich paper. When she’d leaned back in her chair legs crossed and arms comfortably settled in her lap, she’d looked like a real lawyer. “He’ll be home full-time pretty soon,” she’d reminded him, “and in the meantime, spending a couple days—or hours—apart from him doesn’t mean your relationship’s doomed. I _like_ it when Peter stops blowing up my phone.”

Clint’d raised his eyebrows at her. “Blowing up your phone?”

“It’s a thing,” she’d informed him. When he’d started to smirk at her, she’d flipped him off. “It really _is_ a thing,” she’d stressed, and the conversation’d turned to a dozen other things.

A couple hours later, the jury’d handed down a verdict of not guilty, and Clint’s mood had soured all over again. He’d run errands after work, but forgot Sandy’s cat food and had to run back out in a humid summer rain; when he’d emerged from the pet shop with a huge bag of Kitten Chow, he’d discovered that some asshole’d scraped his car without leaving a damn note. He’d eaten a crappy freezer meal while listening to voicemails he’d missed that afternoon—most of them from his brother, asking if he could borrow a car on Monday to take Ally to some appointment she definitely couldn’t miss—and’d fallen asleep without drying his load of laundry _or_ running the dishwasher.

And then, the next morning, Phil’d woken him up with a couple soft kisses before sheepishly murmuring, “I have a couple things I need to finish this morning,” and climbing off the bed.

Clint knows it’s unfair to begrudge Phil any of the work he’s doing—he’s prosecuting a massive case at the federal level, for one, and for two, he’s trying to wrap the damn thing up—but standing out in the yard in the July heat and humidity, it’s hard not to be pissed off. Clint’s tempted, digging the last bits of grass out of the mower bag, to stomp into the house and push Phil’s files to the floor, to climb all over him and kiss him until he’s too distracted to work. He wants to call Ken Blake and tell him where he can shove his triple homicide, then call the airline and cancel Phil’s Monday morning flight. He wants his life back, sticky and imperfect as it usually is.

He wants to fall asleep without wondering if Phil’s _really_ working late, or if something else is happening behind closed doors five hours away.

He shoves all those shitty thoughts to the back of his mind as he reattaches the bag to the mower. He drags the hem of his shirt over his face, discovers that he’s smearing sweat and dirt all over it, and ends up just tossing the shirt toward the front door. The mower drowns out the sounds of summer as much as it drowns out the buzzing in the back of his head, and he focuses on the simple mechanics of the task at hand: push the mower to one side of the lot, turn it around, push it back down the other way. He develops it into a rhythm, fevered monotony that comforts him. He stops noticing the kids who race by on their bikes, the joggers that wave a neighborly greeting, and even the cars that zip down their street. It’s just him and the mower, and he relaxes into it.

At least until somebody lays on a car horn so loud and long that he practically leaps right out of his skin.

He’s about ten feet from the driveway when he hears it but facing the wrong direction, and he abandons the mower to spin on his heel. The purple VW is stopped at the very end of the driveway, less _parked_ and more _crookedly shoved between the bumper of Clint’s hatchback and the street_ , and Kate Bishop slides gracefully out of the driver’s seat. She’s dressed in purple skinny jeans and a black tank top, her dark hair pulled into a messy side ponytail that she sweeps over her shoulder. Clint stares at her, half-convinced that she’s a heat stroke hallucination. 

She, on the other hand, comes as far as the grass line and puts her hands on her hips. “Really?” she asks.

He frowns. “Kate—”

“ _Really_ ,” she repeats, “with the abs and the—” She gestures toward him, her hand flapping idly, and Clint suddenly realizes that he’s half-naked and standing all of eight feet from one of the county’s highest-profile juvenile defendants. He glances over his shoulder at his t-shirt, still bunched up on the front walk, but Kate just sighs. “You’re a travesty.”

“And _you_ shouldn’t be here,” he retorts, turning back toward her. He catches her eye-roll before she pushes her sunglasses back up on her nose, and he crosses his arms over his chest. He thinks maybe it lessens the whole effect until her eyebrows climb practically to her hairline. “You know how much trouble you could get into, showing up at the prosecutor’s house and—”

“Would you believe I was in the neighborhood?” 

“No.”

She pauses for a second, then shrugs. “Well, just because _you_ wouldn’t—”

“Is everything okay out here?” Phil’s voice asks suddenly, and Clint hears the front screen door slam. When he imagines how the whole situation looks—cute, mouthy teenager with a badly-parked car, half-naked boyfriend chatting her up—a flush climbs up his cheek bones and onto the tips of his ears. 

Phil hands him a water bottle. “I heard a car horn,” he explains, “and I thought it might be you signaling helplessly for water and company.”

Clint snorts at the obvious lie, but he accepts the drink. A couple feet away, though, Kate Bishop is staring. She crosses her arms over her chest, and Clint swears he sees her eyes sweep over Phil’s body, indexing his jeans, plain blue t-shirt, and bare feet. After way too long, she finally asks, “This is Mister Denver, I take it?”

“Mister who?” Phil asks, raising his eyebrows.

“This is _Phil_ , yes,” Clint informs her, and she huffs a breath at him. The irritation on her face is as easy to read as a kid’s picture book, but Clint’s got no idea where the hell it comes from. “Phil, this is Kate Bishop. She— Uh, she’s a kid who hangs around the judicial center.”

“I’m a criminal defendant,” Kate clarifies. Out of the corner of his eye, Clint can see Phil roll his lips together to keep from smiling. “And you’re the legendary Barton-boyfriend.”

Phil chuckles. “‘Legendary’ might be pushing it, but I appreciate the compliment.” He glances over at Clint, studying his bare chest and the line of his shoulders before finally settling on his face. Clint recognizes the warmth in his eyes as something a lot greedier than fondness. “If I’d just known she was honking to say hello, I would’ve left you two alone.”

“You apparently missed out on how often people honk at me when I’m mowing,” Clint retorts, and Phil laughs. Across from the two of them, Kate rolls her eyes, but Clint thinks he catches the start of a smile. “You wanna stick around for our usual script, boss? You can learn about her archer-and-dragon books—”

Kate heaves a sigh at him. “Fantasy.”

“—and, I don’t know, her viola lessons.”

“Oh, for the love of—” Kate starts to huff, and Clint cuts her off with a laugh. She tightens her grip on her arms and glances over at Phil. “I play the cello, not the viola.”

Phil’s little smirk fills Clint’s belly with a spike of warmth he can’t really explain. “I’m rather fond of cellists,” he comments, and Clint elbows him pretty hard for that one.

But then, Phil kisses him on the corner of the mouth, mutters something about salt mines, and heads back toward the front door, leaving him and Kate standing there on the yard. Clint expects some kind of warning—he’s been stalked by a kid on a criminal diversion, after all, and now he’s hanging out with her in his front yard like it’s totally normal—but all Phil offers is a shitty little grin. “Be good,” he warns before he disappears through the front door, and Clint can’t figure out which one of them he’s talking to.

When he turns back to Kate, she’s staring at the closed screen door, her arms still crossed. It occurs to him for a second that Phil’s a lot different from Clint—he’s smart and handsome, sure, but he sometimes holds himself a little like a suburban soccer coach husband-and-father, all bland and unremarkable—and that she’s maybe not sure how to process all that. After a couple seconds, she asks, “He always like that?”

He frowns. “Like what?”

“Like— I don’t know.” She gestures vaguely in the direction of the front door. “Like _that_.”

Clint shrugs at her. “He’s working,” he explains, and she drops her hands to her hips. “He’s not usually in top form when he’s working.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not usually shirtless,” she retorts, and only smiles once he surrenders to a laugh.

She leaves a couple minutes later, mumbling something about Jessica Jones’s group therapy and somebody named America’s birthday, and Clint watches her car race down the road before he resumes mowing. There’s maybe a quarter of the yard left, but it’s hard to settle back into the routine. His mind wanders to Phil’s humor and Kate’s lost expression, and by the time he wanders back into the house, the two’ve merged together into a sticky ball of confusion that he can only chase away with a searing hot shower.

The humidity of the July day sticks to him once he’s toweled off and tugged on a fresh pair of boxer briefs, and he leaves the rest of his dirty clothes pooled on the bathroom floor to wander into the office. Phil’s at his desk, glasses on the end of his nose and paperwork spread all around him, but he smiles when Clint wanders in. He pushes back his chair almost like an invitation, Clint accepting it without a second’s hesitation, and they slot together like two pieces of a puzzle: Clint straddling Phil’s lap, the weight half on his feet and half on the chair; Phil’s one hand threading through his damp hair while the other snakes under the waistband of his underwear at the base of his spine. They kiss, slow and messy, and Clint forgets about all his worries in order to lose himself in Phil’s mouth.

When they break apart, Phil chuckles against his jaw. “Should I ask how you acquired a teenager?” he inquires, breathless and halfway to panting.

“When I’m done with you, you won’t have the energy _to_ ask,” Clint returns, and drags him from the chair to the couch.


	11. Things Left Unsaid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, Clint’s friends try and help him figure out his feelings—and then, he tries to help Kate Bishop figure out hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jen and saranoh both yelled about the same thing at the end of this chapter, so you know it's a quality one. Their betaing is superb. The changes I made after they read it may not be. All errors remain my own, though I think this is the last chapter with the hard post-beta edits. We will see.

“Look,” Tony Stark says, his grin dropping into hardcore seriousness, “it is totally and completely within your rights to tell us you’re not pissed at your definitely not-better half.” He reaches over and pats Clint’s shoulder, and Clint grits his teeth to keep from glaring him into submission. “But as your best and arguably only friends—aside from Wilson, who may or may not be human, jury’s still out—it is totally and completely within _our_ rights to point out that you are a lying liar who lies.”

Standing at his husband’s shoulder, Bruce sighs. “Tony,” he warns.

Tony raises both his hands. “In fact,” he adds, “I’m gonna jump ahead and argue that it’s not just our right, it’s our _obligation_.”

“And we’re off,” Bucky mutters under his breath, and at least it gives Clint an excuse to laugh about _something_.

It’s a brilliant, sunny July Sunday, the kinda day that bored kids on their summer breaks dream about from the time the last May school bell rings all the way through ’til August. It’s a day for pick-up baseball in abandoned lots, for roller coasters and burnt hot dogs, and for cannonballs off the springy diving board at the community pool. Clint remembers days like this one, the lazy quiet punctuated only by the occasional crack of a home run echoing across their overgrown ball field or somebody’s mom yelling about dinner, days free of Trick’s anger and the terrifying, uncertain future. He’d hang with Barney and the other guys from the park until the sky went dark, then wait until after his curfew to sprawl out on the rotting wooden bleachers of the ball field and stare up at the stars. 

The stars’d never cared where he’d come from or what he planned to do in another year, or two, or six. They’d just blinked down at him, silver pinpricks in a sea of black that stretched on forever.

Then again, the stars’ll never be as nosy as Tony Stark.

Looking back, he should’ve known that Tony’d grab some of their other friends and descend on Clint like the leader of a flock of vultures, swarming his corpse and pecking him down to the bone. Clint’d shown up late, pissed off and not exactly in a party state of mind, and he’d grabbed a beer and before retreating into the far back of the yard. Somebody’d already set up chairs around the fire pit—like anybody needed a fire in the middle of July—and Clint’d planted himself behind one, his back to the fenced-in tree line and his attention wandering around the various clumps of conversation. Natasha and Pepper’d staked a place on the porch swing, sharing conversation over a plate full of cheese cubes and crunchy vegetables; Jasper, who’d apparently revoked Stark’s grill privileges and now wielded the spatula of doom, had stood chatting with Peggy and Maria; Darcy’d stolen baby Astrid and left her boyfriend to chat awkwardly with Thor and Jane. Clint’d ended up watching Dot—poised like a fairy queen in her bright pink inner tube and matching water wings—instruct Miles and Ganke through a variety of pool-based acrobatics. They’d performed hand-stands, backward somersaults, breath-holding drills, _forward_ somersaults, and even—

“There’s no such thing as a water cartwheel, Dot!” Miles’d complained. He’d shaved his head almost bald before his first science camp’d started—“He pretends he’s not hell-bent on being the summer camp hottie, but trust me, I _know_ things,” Tony’d explained weeks ago—and the sun reflecting off the water’d turned his skin a deep, golden-tinged brown. He’d stared at the little blonde dictator standing on the pool steps. “Pick something else.”

Dot’d huffed and attempted, despite the water wings, to cross her arms. “I bet Ganke can do one,” she’d challenged.

Ganke, who’d finally hoisted himself onto a neon green pool raft, had held up his hands. “I am _so_ staying out of this.”

Miles, predictably, had shoved him right back into the water, and Clint’d laughed at the two of them splashing one another until he’d realized that the vultures’d surrounded him.

They’re mostly all still staring at him—Tony with squinty-eyed curiosity, Bruce with an embarrassed little smile, Bucky with mild disinterest, and Steve with bare-faced, unrestrained concern—when he sighs. He drags a hand through his hair and shakes. “For the last time, not that I think you’ll believe me, I’m not pissed off at anybody,” he repeats. Steve rolls his lips together and glances down at his feet. “ _What_? Do I look like a miserable asshole or something?”

“You are standing by yourself away from everybody else,” Bucky points out. Clint narrows his eyes at him, and he shrugs with one shoulder. “Just saying.”

The corner of Bruce’s mouth kicks up into a tiny smile. “And you are here, well, alone,” he adds carefully.

“While cryptically blaming Coulson’s absence on ’work,’ which we all know that’s a classic couple’s lie,” Tony jumps in. Bruce shoots him a sharp glance, and he raises his hands. “What? Clint can’t use the old, ’He went out for drinks with Natasha and Clint and left me alone with our kid,’ now can he?”

Bruce purses his lips, hanging onto his disapproval until Tony nudges him in the side and slings an arm low around his waist. Clint rolls his eyes, glad that the public display of affection’s distracted them momentarily, and downs a couple hungry swallows of beer. It’s only after Tony earns an elbow to the ribs for trying to untuck Bruce’s shirt that Bucky observes, “You stayed on topic for fifteen seconds.”

“Hush, Daddy’s flirting, we’ll get back to Clint’s relationship crisis in a minute or two,” Tony retorts, and Bruce and Bucky both laugh.

Clint shakes his head at the three of them, the screwed-up modern day Stooges that they are, and returns to his beer. The smell of Bucky’s secret-recipe chicken wings, along with beer-battered brats and slightly-charred hotdogs, drifts across the yard, and Clint closes his eyes to breath it all in. He wants to enjoy Stark’s stupid barbecue and revel in the lazy summer day—not too hot or humid, a little breezy, filled with warm sunlight and good friends—but his mind keeps betraying him, jumping from this moment back to his shitty morning and leaving him disoriented. 

Because he’d woken up that morning to find Phil asleep on the office couch, glasses falling off his nose because he’d never stopped working to come to bed. And he’d slopped together a huge potato salad for the barbecue while Phil’d drifted between the coffee pot and the office. And he’d felt his patience fray and snap when he’d stood in the hallway and listened to Phil explain—

“You can tell us if something’s wrong,” Steve says gently, and Clint jerks out of his sticky thoughts to meet the guy’s worried eyes. He’s in one of his ridiculously tight t-shirts and star-spangled shorts, and he offers a tiny smile that barely hides his Stark-level nosiness

Clint rolls his eyes. “Nothing’s really _wrong_ ,” he insists. He sighs when Steve raises an eyebrow. “Look, can I just take the fifth and change the subject, please??”

“Well, I don’t know about these guys, but I’m not planning on filing criminal charges related to your chronic dishonesty,” Tony retorts, gesturing with his beer. “And since, really, that’s the only applicability of the Fifth Amendment in the current situation—”

“Okay, okay, yeah,” Clint cuts him off, and he glances away as Tony flashes a smug grin. The longer they stare, though, the more his face warms, and he’s stuck finishing off his beer rather than filling up the silence. Once he’s ditched his empty bottle, he sighs. “The Novak case sort of spiraled outta his control,” he says finally, shoving his hands in his pockets. “It’s a mess, and he’s trying to stay on top of it before he hands it over and heads home for good. Part of that’s working on some stuff for a big motions hearing tomorrow.” He shrugs and stares at a place somewhere around Steve’s knee. “It’s not like I didn’t know this’d happen, back when he decided to take the job. It’s just kinda hard to ignore him locking himself in the office all weekend long.”

The quiet sweeps back over them for a couple long seconds, and Clint’s pretty sure part of that includes his friends exchanging worried little glances. 

“Have you said anything to Phil?” Steve asks quietly.

Clint snorts. “Like what?” he demands, finally jerking his head up. Concern flickers across Steve’s face, but the guy drops his eyes down to his water bottle instead of meeting Clint’s gaze. “This is a once-in-a-career kinda thing. I can’t be the dickhead who throws a hissy-fit because he’s not coming out to play with our friends.”

Bucky frowns. “That’s not really—”

“Except it is,” Clint cuts him off. He sighs and rubs a hand over his face. “He waited ’til ten minutes before we had to be here to back out,” he says softly. “It’s just—”

He finds out right then that there’s no way to finish his damn sentence, so he settles for shaking his head. For a couple beats, they’re totally silent except for Steve worrying his plastic water bottle between his hands—at least, until Stark releases a huffy breath that mostly sounds like a laugh.

“You have _got_ to be kidding me,” he says, and everybody snaps to stare at him. He rolls his eyes. “Really? We’re jumping into full sulk-bucket mode over _this_? That’s what our shared existence has come to?”

Bruce glances over at him, his jaw tight. “Tony, I don’t think now is the time to—”

“Okay, sorry, spousal veto on your reasonableness here, because Clint actually needs to hear this,” Stark interrupts, and Bruce scowls hard enough that his brow bunches. Stark ignores him to point a finger over at Clint. “It’s time that I opened your eyes to a little universal truth that I, one-half of our office’s most successful marriage, am uniquely qualified to—”

“Wait,” Bucky sputters, nearly choking on a mouthful of beer. “Since when are you two the office’s most successful marriage?”

Tony sighs. “Please, Bucky-Bear, the grown-ups are talking,” he says with a dismissive wave of his hand. Next to him, Steve blushes as red as the stripes on his shorts. Clint mouths _Bucky-Bear_ to Bruce, who shrugs.

“Hey, kids, eyes front,” Tony breaks in, snapping his fingers a few times. Clint shakes his head as he glances over—and finds himself staring into Tony’s big, unblinking eyes. “The thing about relationships,” he says, “is that you can’t actually keep them going by sulking in glorious, unbroken silence. You have to open up the channels of communication until they go from being one of those weird one-way lane cluttered up with construction zones to a communicative superhighway.”

Bucky snorts. “This from you?”

“Uh, yeah. Because when it comes to my relationship, I’m super honest.” Everyone, including Bruce, turns to stare at Tony, and he shrugs. “Ish. Honest _ish_. As in mostly-honest.” When nobody looks away, he raises his hands. “New game: everybody stops staring at Tony.”

Across their little circle, Steve chuckles and shakes his head. His eyes track over Clint for a tense, quiet second. “I hate to admit it,” he says finally, “but Tony’s right.”

Tony grins. “See?” he asks Bruce. Bruce rolls his eyes.

“Well, okay, Tony’s _kind of_ right,” Steve amends, and Tony’s triumph immediately drops away. Steve ignores it and forces a little smile. “I just mean—” he starts to say, but he glances over at Bucky before he finishes the thought. Bucky nods, and Steve swallows before he nods back.

“I was eighteen when Bucky left for boot camp,” he says carefully, his hands tightening around his water bottle. “Growing up, I’d never really had an example for how relationships worked, and I remember thinking, ’I can’t let him down. He’ll walk if I disappoint him.’” He shrugs softly. “By the time we’d been apart a couple months, I’d lay awake at night and tell the ceiling how sad and lonely and scared I was. Because if I told the ceiling, I didn’t have to tell Bucky, and that meant I wouldn’t let him down.”

Tony snorts a little at that, rolling his eyes. “I prefer Skype for late-night feelings,” he mumbles, but when Bruce elbows him, he presses their shoulders together. 

Steve chuckles, the sound soft and breathless. “My grandma heard me one night,” he admits, shaking his head again. “She didn’t interrupt or anything, but she sat me down the next morning and told me that if I never did _anything_ else right in my relationship, I at least needed to be honest. ’If you miss that boy, you tell him,’ she said. ’Nothing gets fixed if you don’t first take the time to point out all the cracks.’”

He smiles, big and genuine enough that it’s almost blinding, and Clint fights against the tight, dry feeling in the back of his throat by wetting his lips. “You told him?”

“Yeah,” Steve replies. He tosses a glance toward Bucky, who salutes with his beer bottle. “And we ended up surviving four years on different continents, so I think it turned out okay.”

Bucky snorts. “Well, don’t oversell it or anything,” he chides, but he reaches over and strokes his hand over Steve’s lower back, anyway.

“My point,” Steve presses once his husband’s inched closer and settled a hand just above his waistband, “is that you can’t let your relationship be ruled by fear. Phil loves you. He won’t disappear just because you’re honest with him.”

Clint nods. “Yeah,” he murmurs, and tries really hard to smile like he believes all that. 

They stand there for a while longer, their silence unbroken by anything louder than the summer breeze, but then Jasper hollers at them that the food’s ready and everything else falls away. Clint grabs his empty bottle and drifts across the yard behind the two happy couples, and for the first time all afternoon, he realizes just how badly he _misses_ Phil. The frustration and anger that’s lived in his belly all afternoon is replaced by the kind of bone-deep longing people write poems about, and after he loads up his plate with wings, a hot dog, and a half-dozen side dishes, he retreats to the porch to eat on his own. He watches his friends out in the yard, chatting and laughing together, and tries not to feel like somebody’s sawed off one of his limbs. 

He’s still standing at the wide railing around the porch and picking at the remnants of Pepper’s fancy Brussels sprout salad when Maria suddenly steps up beside him. She places one of Jasper’s obscure draft beers in front of him, swigging from her own bottle. Her hair flows loose around her shoulders.

She leans forward, elbows on the rail and bottle dangling from her long fingers, and sighs. “You’d think, the amount they all see each other, they’d want to break off into different groups or _something_.”

Clint frowns. “Who?”

“The couples,” she replies, sweeping her beer hand out toward the yard. “Most of them spend literally every waking moment together, and yet here we are: paired off like the world’s worst game of _Old Maid_.” Clint rolls his lips together to keep from smirking, and she scowls at him. “Do _not_ go there.”

He raises his hands. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he promises, and she stares him down while she necks her beer. He chuckles, shaking his head, and gazes back out across Stark’s ridiculously oversized backyard. Everybody’s settled down for dinner with their partners like some kinda biological imperative: Stark steals off Bruce’s plate while both Natasha and Pepper roll their eyes at him; Bucky and Steve together corral a wild-haired Dot into eating something; Darcy, Peter, Jane, and Thor all bunch together around a card table, passing Astrid from knee to knee every time she starts to squirm. Really, the only exceptions to the rule are Ganke and Miles, who’re still sprawled out on floatation devices in the pool, and—

Clint points over to where Peggy and Jasper are still filling up their plates. “Your grill buddies break your rule,” he points out, and Maria squints in that direction before she rolls her eyes. Clint frowns again. “Unless they’re a thing.”

Maria laughs. “Not unless Peggy’s type changed recently,” she replies, and he grins at her. They stand there for a couple silent minutes, drinking their beers and swaying with the pulse of the breeze and the conversations around them. 

Eventually, she sets her bottle down on the rail. “How pissed should I be at him?”

Clint glances over and discovers she’s scowling. “At who?”

“At Phil.” He snorts, rolling his eyes, and she immediately plants her hands on her hips. “In case you forgot, all your friends are highly-trained attorneys who know how to read body language. So unless you’re about to tell me that the reason you’ve reverted back into sad-puppy Clint is because your cat just died—”

“Leave my cat out of this.”

“—I’m going to assume it’s because Phil decided to be an insensitive jerk.” Clint presses his lips together, and Maria raises her eyebrows. “Is the cat alive?”

“Hill—”

“It’s a yes or no question, Barton.” When he glances away, she steps closer. Even without her three-inch heels, she’s as hard as stone. He stares down at her baby-pink toenails. “Is your cat alive?”

She taps her toes impatiently, and he smiles a little at that. But he still needs to swallow tightly before he can answer, “The cat’s fine.”

Maria’s toe stills once he’s said it, and he raises his eyes to meet hers. They stare at each other for a long time before she shakes her head. “Phil’s a good man,” she says. “Aside from my dad and my brothers, he might be the best man I know. But sometimes, he needs somebody to smack him upside the head and remind him of that.”

Clint can’t help the snort of laughter that jumps out of him, or the grin that piggy-backs behind it. She smirks as she sips her beer. 

“That a fact?” he asks.

“Gospel truth,” she swears, and pats his arm before she walks off.

He spends a long time thinking about that conversation, bottle in his hand as he leans against the porch rail and watches the barbecue carry on without him. Natasha waves at him when Stark starts breaking out the sparklers around dusk, but he just smiles and shakes his head. It’s easier, in a way, to let his thoughts run away from him when he’s apart from the rest of the crowd and watches wide-eyed Dot while she marvels at a sparkler she’s absolutely _not_ allowed to touch.

It’s only when Stark finds a bunch of obnoxiously noisy firecrackers in his box of highly illegal fireworks that somebody murmurs, “I don’t suppose you’d like some company.”

Clint spins around so fast that he almost elbows his beer into the flowerbed, but behind him, Phil just smiles softly. He’s wearing jeans and a dark blue polo shirt, the buttons open against the heat, and in the dim light from the lawn torches and Stark’s weird orange fairy lights, his face glows. For a couple seconds, Clint stares at him, half-convinced that he’ll disappear the second Clint blinks, but Phil just slides his hands in his pockets. “I was informed there’s a cake with my name on it.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “Stark texted you?”

“And Steve and Maria,” Phil replies, nodding. “I’m apparently some breed of insensitive jerk,” he adds, his voice quieter than before.

Clint shrugs and presses his lips together. “And I suck at telling people when they screw up,” he offers, but he can’t exactly meet Phil’s eyes.

The fireworks echo like gunshots behind them as they stand there, Clint’s mind tripping back to that afternoon. They’d argued with each other, shouting down the hallway as Phil dragged his hand over his messy hair. Clint’d ignored that, and the exhaustion written all over his face, to throw up his hands and slam the door behind him. He can’t remember all of what he said anymore, not when Phil’s close enough to touch, but he knows he snarled _glad you fucking came home_ before he stormed out of the house.

_Their_ house.

Guilt curls in his gut ’til it chokes him, but when he looks across the porch, he realizes Phil’s closed some of the space between them. “I should have said something as soon as I knew I was swamped,” he says softly, “but you know how it is, you get lost in a case and—”

“Forget your guy’s in the other room, prepping for a party that included you on the invitation?” Clint cuts in. His voice is hard enough that Phil blinks at it, hurt rushing across his face. Clint sighs and tips his head up to the sky, the stars all blotted out by the bright lights in the yard. “Look, I’m not good at all this. I—” 

He waves a hand, the words escaping him, and forces himself to look over at Phil. His eyes are open and familiar, the same eyes that’d watched Clint spill all his secrets and that still watch him unravel under Phil’s touch. He swallows the lump in his throat. “It just sucks,” he says finally. “It sucks when you spend a couple weeks barely talking to me and then just come home to work. Like maybe it’s, you know—”

“Like maybe it’s you?” Phil asks gently. Clint presses his lips together, and Phil sighs. “It’s not _you_ , Clint. It could never—” He shakes his head. He’s tempted, all of a sudden, to plaster a hand to Phil’s side. He wants to hold onto the anger, to be righteously fucking pissed the way he deserves, but the longer he stands there, the more he wants to forget their stupid fight.

He glances away before Phil can see all that written on his face.

After another second, Phil says, “It’s this case.” His voice is soft and distant. “I can’t screw it up. It’s complicated and difficult, and the victims deserve my full attention.”

“And the rest of us?”

Phil releases a little breath, and when Clint glances up at him, it’s in time to catch Phil’s mouth tipping into a tiny, private smile. “I didn’t come because I ran out of work,” he says, and as much as Clint tries to roll his eyes, he smiles back.

Clint’s not sure who closes the distance between them or whether they both do, but he knows that his hands find Phil’s hips and pull their bodies flush together just as Stark sets off a stupid-loud bottle rocket in the yard. The bang is deafening, ringing through Clint’s whole body, but he can’t really complain when Phil’s mouth is capturing his in a kiss. It’s long and languid, stretching out into the summer night like the fingers of sparkling fireworks stretch across the sky. Clint curls his fingers in Phil’s belt loops, clinging to him, and sighs helplessly into his mouth.

The fading colors of a second—or third or fifth, Clint hasn’t counted—firework casts strange shadows across Phil’s face when they break apart, their chests plastered together and their shared breaths escaping in tiny pants. Phil leans in to nudge his nose against Clint’s jaw, and Clint feels his eyelids flutter shut. They sleep like that sometimes, Phil’s face against his neck, and the two weeks of sleeping alone rush over him like an unbroken wave.

“I promised Stark I’d eat a piece of my birthday cake before we left,” Phil murmurs against his skin, and Clint’s surprised at his own tiny laugh. “But after that, we’re definitely leaving.”

“Definitely,” Clint agrees, and steals another kiss.

 

==

 

“I’m just saying that in my incredible, super-sexy experience—”

“And I’m still not taking relationship advice from you,” Clint interrupts, and Wade’s huffy, breathless laugh carries over the sound of their feet beating the pavement.

It is a sweltering, disgusting Tuesday evening, the air sticky as honey and twice as thick, and for reasons Clint can’t explain, he’s out running with Wade Wilson. He’s kinda spent his whole day running, dashing up and down the back staircase in the judicial complex or zipping between hearings in a variety of courtrooms; he figures his evening might as well follow along, just with the added benefit of a sweat-soaked shirt and sore knees. Because unlike on Sunday, the only breeze that rustles through the trees is furnace-hot and hateful.

The further from the house they run, the more Clint realizes that they’re the only people dumb enough to brave the heat.

He kinda wants to die.

Instead, he swipes sweat off his brow before it drips into his eyes again. When he drops his arm, he catches Wade’s kicked-puppy expression, all pouting lip and fluttery eyelashes. He rolls his eyes. “What?”

Wade shakes his head and looks straight ahead, pushing himself a little harder. A couple yards away, a dog walker struggles with three mutts and a fluffy white mop of barking fur. Clint’s lungs burn as he picks up the pace so he’s still running even with Wade. 

“What?” he repeats.

Wade shrugs. “Nothing.”

“Wade—”

“ _Nothing_ ,” Wade says firmly, but he immediately starts humming an off-pitch version of “Black Hole Sun.”

Clint sighs.

Dropping Phil off at the airport yesterday morning for another damn flight to Denver had felt like the last five minutes of calm before a huge storm. They’d lounged in bed ’til the last possible second, all lazy hands and breathless sighs; they’d kissed in the departure lane, not greedy but warm and soft, Clint’d trying to breathe in as much of his guy as possible in those last couple seconds. Phil’d felt real right then, and Clint’d clung to the lingering sensation of lips on the corner of his mouth even after Phil’d left. But something about their goodbye had stuck with Clint all day, like an old scar pulling funny in the wrong kind of weather. 

He’d checked his cell phone on and off all day, expecting Phil to feel the same dull burn. Instead, he’d earned a couple casual text messages before Phil’d called for a brief, too-late goodnight.

Now, in the suffocating July humidity, Clint wonders which storm’ll break first: the one gathering up in the clouds, or the one somewhere in the middle of his chest.

He’s about to explain this all to Wade, too—or at least, to _try_ and spell it all out, all the worries and inadequacies that keep rushing around in his head—when the other guy skids to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk. Clint barely avoids colliding into his sweat-drenched back, tripping over his own two feet and twisting his ankle.

“The hell?” he demands, almost falling off the edge of the sidewalk and into the grass.

But Wade’s latest bout of crazy’s apparently turned him deaf, ’cause he grabs Clint by the shoulders instead of responding. Clint squawks, about as dignified as somebody’s pet parrot, but Wade ignores him and shoves him onto the sidewalk. He ducks behind him, fingers curled in the back of his sleeveless tank.

“Hide me,” Wade instructs, “and do it right away.”

Clint rolls his eyes.

But then, realizes that somewhere in the last couple minutes, they left the sidewalk and headed onto the heavily-shaded path that circles the local park. The soccer field, tennis courts, and playground equipment are all pretty deserted thanks to the heat; a couple kids around Miles Morales’s age chat idly on the swings, sure, but otherwise, the place feels like a ghost town aside from the constantly-running water fountains by the questionable park bathroom.

Except that in that park, sitting at a picnic table and dressed in cut-off shorts and a boxy white t-shirt advertising some school organization, is Kate Bishop.

All Clint’s complaints dry up the second he spots her, and he’s stuck staring at her for a lot longer than he maybe wants to admit. Across from her, there’s teenager, a tall blonde with an unruly ponytail that hangs down her back, and she gestures while she talks. Kate’s head bobs and her lips purse as she listens, loose strands of dark hair falling out of the messy twist at the bottom of her neck. None of her smiles meet her eyes, and something in Clint’s gut clenches.

“We need to leave,” Wade hisses, and Clint jerks a little when he remembers the guy’s literally cowering behind him. “Run backwards and we might make it out alive.”

He tugs at Clint’s shirt, and Clint grits his teeth. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“You mean besides the fact that my most terrifying client is apparently on a playdate at your friendly neighborhood park and I want to avoid her like it’s the Middle Ages and she’s a plague-carrying rat?” Wade pauses and tips his head to one side. “Actually, no, that’s the only thing on the list right now. Kind of a new high for me, actually, which we can discuss at length after we _run away from Kate Bishop_.”

He pulls on Clint’s shirt hard enough to knock him off his balance, and when Clint swears, both Kate and her blonde friend whip around to stare at them. The blonde stares, wide-eyed and a little spooked, but Kate— 

Clint’s not sure what to call the face she pulls, but it’s definitely not surprise. No, the smile that crawls across her lips is smug and pretty self-satisfied, and Clint almost grins back at her. At least, ’til she crosses her arms and cocks her head to the side.

“He knows he’s taller than you, right?” she asks.

“There’s nobody here but us Bartons!” Wade announces in a low, gravelly voice that Clint suspects is supposed to sound like him. He scoots closer to Clint, adding more heat to the already-disgusting summer air, and Clint gives him one last second of insanity before he steps down _hard_ on the guy’s toe. Wade drops an f-bomb loud enough to scare a couple squirrels up a tree, and finally releases Clint. “I am listing you first on the horrible friend index from now until the end of days and I am not even sorry!” he spits, hopping awkwardly on one foot.

“That’s not even a thing,” Clint informs him. He grins when Wade flips him the bird, and over at the picnic table, Kate laughs. She ditches her bag on the bench and motions at her friend to walk over; when the friend hesitates, she kicks her lightly ’til she stands up.

The blonde squints at them—sweat-soaked, panting, Wade grumbling about Bad Friend Watch Lists—pretty suspiciously, and stops five feet short of the sidewalk. “Are you _sure_ you know them?” she asks, and Kate rolls her eyes. 

“For the last time, Cassie, they’re okay,” she insists, but Cassie’s jaw clenches anyway. In skinny jeans, a tank top, and a sleeveless denim vest, she looks like she belongs in the lineup for an all-acoustic open mic night at a coffee shop. She keeps staring, and Kate throws up her hands. “Look, that one is my lawyer, Wade,” she says, and Wade stops dancing around on one foot to stand up straight. “The other one’s his crush, Barton.”

Wade sputters and shakes his head hard enough that sweat flies everywhere. “I told you that in solidarity and confidence!” he accuses, pointing a finger directly at Kate’s nose. Kate smirks. “Mixed-gender bros before mixed-gender names I won’t call your little friend because I don’t know her well enough to imply she’s something rude.”

The blonde—Cassie—flushes a funny shade of pink, but Clint just holds up his hands. “Wait a second,” he cuts in. “You told your sixteen-year-old client that I’m your crush?”

Wade crosses his arms over his chest. “I trusted her puppy-dog eyes.”

Clint snorts. “I can’t wait until you explain this one to Nate.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Wade squints at him for a second, but it’s more exasperated than suspicious. “Okay, since you’re apparently not kidding, I will break it down for you like this: Nate and I have already exchanged our annotated guilt-free threes with footnotes and everything. You should feel honored. And you, Bishop, should feel shame. Because, again: solidarity and confidence!”

Wade jabs a finger into Kate’s shoulder, and she sways like there’s actual force behind it, grinning. Cassie worries her lower lip between her teeth. “Are all lawyers like this?” she asks.

Clint shakes his head. “No.”

“Absolutely yes,” Wade says at the exact same time, and Kate immediately bursts out laughing. It’s warm and free like you’d expect from a girl her age, and Clint realizes a couple seconds too late that he’s smiling because of it. Cassie lingers out of reach ’til Kate rolls her eyes and drags her onto the sidewalk. They scuffle for a second, all elbow jabs, and then Kate loops her arm through Cassie’s and pins her in place.

“This is Cassie, a fellow member of Jess’s League of Extraordinarily Screwed-Up Gentleteens,” she introduces, and Cassie’s face screws up into a grimace. Kate ignores it to pull her closer. “We’re talking about her boy problems.”

“Kate,” Cassie hisses, “you can’t just tell your lawyer and his boyfriend—”

“ _Not_ his boyfriend,” Clint interrupts when Kate cracks up again.

“—all about our _stuff_.” She jerks away from Kate to cross her arms over her chest, glaring down at her. “I don’t want them knowing that I see Jess, or that Nathaniel and I are—” 

“But we’re good with boy problems,” Wade volunteers. His whole head’s damp, and Clint realizes that he must’ve jogged over to the water fountain and shoved his face in the water. He wipes his arm across his face. “I have a boyfriend and Clint has a _life partner_ —”

“I’ve never called him that,” Clint reminds him.

“—and, I mean, neither of us landed there with, like, the grace and dignity of a Nicholas Sparks novel.” He pauses, frowning. “Unless any of those books involve dating a girl who you like as a person but not as a girlfriend, or lying to the bar admissions people so you almost screw up your whole life, or—”

“Please stop talking,” Clint cuts him off, and when Wade blinks blankly at him, Cassie finally smiles.

They linger on the sidewalk for a couple minutes after that, Wade bouncing between the conversation and the water fountain like a hyperactive puppy, and Clint learns tiny shreds of information about Cassie: she works part-time at the coffee shop across from the judicial complex, she’s interested in engineering, and she’s torn between two boys who both “trend toward being assholes.” She scowls at Kate’s explanation of the last part, but Kate smiles, proving that she and Cassie’ve battled their way through the same conversation before.

It’s only after the sun’s dipped behind a bank of thick gray clouds and plunged them into twilight darkness that Kate elbows Cassie. “Your mom’ll freak if I don’t get you home,” she says, and Cassie snorts and tosses her ponytail. 

“Where’s home?” Wade asks. He’s crouched down on the sidewalk, retying his shoe for about the hundredth time.

“Cass and most the other kids in group live over in Union County,” Kate explains while Cassie heads back to the table to grab their bags, “but Cassie got the weekend job here because Jonas lives here—”

“There were like three more steps than that!” Cassie shouts back to her.

“—and her mom lets me drive her around as long as she’s home before dark.” The blonde mutters something about mothers that Clint can’t quite hear, but it makes Kate smirk. “She’s a little overprotective.”

“It’s better than being underprotective,” Wade says. He stops stretching his arms over his head when Kate blinks at him, shrugging and highlighting the muscles that Clint mostly forgets the guy even has. “I’m not a parent, so it’s kind of not my place to judge other people’s parenting styles or whatever—if it works for your kid and you’re not hurting her, I really don’t care what you do, you know?—but trust me from my life experience: overprotective at least means somebody cares. Underprotective, on the other hand—” He lets out a long, low whistle. “It’d probably hurt less to not have parents at all then having parents who literally could not give two shits that you exist.” 

Clint snorts without really thinking about it, and Wade tosses a glance over his way. “I mean, I’m assuming and everything,” he adds sympathetically, and Clint forces a tiny smile. He shrugs, too, but Kate stares at him like he’s a total stranger anyway, her lips pursed. He shoves his hands in his pockets instead of meeting her eyes.

She’s a defendant in a juvenile case, he reminds himself. He’s not supposed to bond over dead parents—or, really, over _anything_.

But before Kate says anything, Cassie reappears and shoves her back at her. “My step-dad’s a cop,” she says almost randomly. “Between that and the whole Dead Dad Syndrome, my mom’s afraid I’m going to be the next episode of _Dateline Mystery_.”

“They solve those sometimes, you know,” Wade points out.

“Not often enough for my mom’s tastes,” Cassie retorts, and when she grins, Wade grins right back.

They watch the girls retreat to the parking lot before they stop at the water fountain and head back to Clint’s. Sun or no sun, the heat’s still unbearable, and they pace themselves, their footfalls a whole lot less eager than when they’d taken off over an hour ago. Clint stares at their shadows stretching down as he falls easily into their usual rhythm.

It’s a good ten minutes later when Wade says, “I could’ve sworn she lived up by Stark.”

Clint jerks his head up to glance over at the guy. He wipes sweat out of his eyes before he asks, “Who?”

“Bishop.” Wade shrugs a little. “I mean, her dad’s stupid-crazy-rich, right? Like, Stark-rich, but without the cute little black kid to keep him humble? And yeah, I know the black kid came after the humility, it just sounded better in my head than recounting all of his tragic backstory.” He waves a hand, and Clint purses his lips. “I’m just saying, I could’ve sworn she didn’t live around here.”

Clint listens to their footfalls for a couple seconds. “She can go to whatever park she wants, you know.”

Wade snorts. “Sure, yeah, she _can_ ,” he intones, but he never finishes the sentence. Clint raises an eyebrow at him, Wade raises an eyebrow _back_ , and they stare at each other until they joy past a house that, for whatever reason, reminds Wade of the Temple of Doom.

He hums the _Indiana Jones_ them song for the whole rest of their run.

Wade steals a bottle of water out of Phil’s Costco cabinet—Clint’s tried to convince the man that they don’t need two cases of water and a mile of paper towel shoved down there, but he’s yet to win that fight—before heading out to his Geo Metro, and Clint sits on the front stoop as the car putters down the street and disappears. The streetlights flicker on like something out of an old-time movie, their glow spreading as the sky around them pitches into night. Thunder echoes in the distance, threatening a storm that probably won’t show up; inside, Sandy mews and paces just behind the screen door.

Clint’s watching heat lightning arc through cloudy sky when he hears his cell phone chime in the living room. When he jumps up to grab it, he’s not all that surprised to find that Phil’s the one who texted him. 

_We’re just heading to dinner_ , the message reads. _I’ll call you when we’re finished, probably late_. 

He thumbs open a response, but he leaves his phone on the coffee table without answering. Once he’s showered and tossed his sweat-stained clothes in the wash, he unlocks the screen and shoots off a quick _okay, sure_ to his guy.

He ditches his phone on the couch and wanders into the kitchen, where he digs a bunch of leftovers out of the fridge and heats them all up on the same plate. He sops up the last of the curry with a pizza crust like he’s back in college, and piles pad thai noodles onto a piece of too-floppy naan because it’s _there_. When he’s finished, he heads back out onto the stoop, a bottle of beer in his hand, and settles down to watch the lightning leap across the sky.

The car pulls up a good half-hour later.

He notices the headlights first, a distant yellow glow that disappears the second the car turns onto their street and pitches their road into sudden, unnatural darkness. It inches toward the house slowly, like a caterpillar on the underside of the leaf—or maybe, Clint thinks, more like a beetle. Because the closer the car creeps, the easier it is to make out its short little snubbed nose and funny domed roof. From his spot on the stoop, he can even tell the color, a weird shade of purple he’s _sure_ the owner special-ordered.

And why not? Anything for Derek Bishop’s pretty daughter, right?

The VW stops in the middle of the road, its brake lights flaring red in the dark like a firework, and Clint sips his beer as he waits. After a couple minutes, it crawls over to the curb and parks there. The engine dies, and the door creaks open loud enough to drown out the distant thunder.

“I wondered when you’d catch me red-handed,” Kate calls out once she’s slammed the door behind her.

She’s dressed in the same clothes as in the park, her hair in a messy twist, but when she steps into the dim glow of the porch light, Clint realizes that her face is completely different. It’s open and half-frightened, her eyes wide, and Clint reads the exhaustion her face the same way he usually reads Phil’s. She crosses the grass and steps onto his front walk, her throat working for a second. When Clint necks his beer again, she nods to herself, walks up to the stoop, and drops down to sit next to him.

She leans her elbows on her legs to stare out across his yard. “You going to tell me I shouldn’t be here?” 

“You going to listen if I do?” he asks, and she snorts a laugh instead of answering. He shakes his head. “I know something’s going on,” he says, and holds up a hand when she glances over at him. “I can’t force you to talk to me, but you should know I’m not dumb enough to miss that something’s wrong—and that it’s getting worse instead of better.”

Kate rolls her eyes. “You know that, do you?”

“Yeah.”

“Because you’re a mind-reader?”

“’Cause I was sixteen once, too.” She snorts at him again, looking away, and he ditches his beer so he can lean forward and try to catch her eyes. Her whole body’s tight, wound up like a spring, and when he shifts to face her, she flinches away. “You wanna know why I don’t suck at dealing with you? It’s because I’ve been there. I’ve watched my life spiral out of control, and trust me, I _know_ how the story ends.”

She huffs at him and shakes her head. “You’re my cautionary tale, is that it?” she asks, throwing him a stony glare. “Because I hate to break it to you, but you’re not my dad.”

“I’ll never be anybody’s dad,” Clint replies, shrugging. “But I might do pretty okay as your friend.”

Kate opens her mouth for a second, but the only sound that escapes is a little puff of breath. The anger slips off her face, replaced with a bald helplessness that kinda punches Clint in the stomach. For a second, he sees the real Kate Bishop: determined, ferocious, and scared to fucking death.

She wraps her arms around herself for a second, almost like she’s cold in the sweltering summer heat. “You’re way too old to be my friend, Barton,” she mutters, and Clint laughs a little as he retrieves his beer.

They sit in silence for a long time before Kate knocks her shoulder into his and pushes to her feet. In the near-dark, it’s hard to tell if her eyes are red from exhaustion or something else, but she just flashes him a brief, tiny smile as she crosses the yard and climbs into the VW. Clint lingers on the porch, watching as the car zips down the street and disappear from view.

When he heads inside, Sandy’s asleep on his pillow, so he strips out of his clothes and lies on Phil’s side, surrounded by the familiarity of his scent on their sheets and the pillowcase. When he finally sleeps, he dreams of purple VWs and convenience store robberies, and of Kate Bishop’s laughter echoing across a sticky-hot July day.

And it’s not ’til he’s halfway through his shower the next morning that he realizes Phil never called.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess what! Last weekend, I took some drabble prompts because I felt like it. I know I should've advertised it here, too, but it was one of those spur-of-the-moment things. However, if you want to read them, you can look through the tag for those drabbles [here](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/search/limited+action+drabbles).


	12. Lying to Girls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, Clint fights two very different battles: one with the guy he loves, and one for the girl he’s trying to help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for very vague references to assault against women.
> 
> A vast amount of thanks to Jen and saranoh, both of whom caught really quirky mistakes in this chapter. Like "granny" instead of "grinny." Yeah, that's the quality writing I produce.

“You mean like how I saw you last weekend?” Clint demands, and on the other end of the phone line, Phil totally stops talking.

Clint’s voice echoes against the cinderblock and steel of the back staircase before it slips into a heavy, almost suffocating silence. It’s an eerie kind of silence, like the one that follows unexpected gunfire or the howl of a siren down a sleepy street in the dead of night, and Clint stops pacing around the landing to drag his fingers through his hair. Phil’s breath hisses in his ear, uneven and a little huffy, and Clint resists the urge to kick the nearest stair.

“Say something already,” he snaps.

“What do you want me to say?” Phil murmurs, and Clint’s stomach clenches at how far away he sounds.

Once the shock’d worn off and he’d rinsed the shampoo out of his burning eyes, he’d spent his whole damn morning trying to forgive Phil’s forgotten phone call. He’d run through a dozen scenarios during his morning routine of dressing, drinking coffee, and driving into work: dinner ran long ‘cause they’d eaten with important people; some new break in the case popped up and required a whole lot of extra attention; somebody’d eaten some rancid seafood and Phil, boy scout buddy of the year, had tagged along to the emergency room. Clint’d turned it into this whole ridiculous fantasy by the time he showed up to work, one where Phil bravely interviewed a new witness before holding Blake’s hair back while the guy puked his guts out, and he’d walked into work with a smile on his face. He’d accepted a whole bunch of files from Darcy, called Sif to confirm their plea negotiation meeting, and then finally opened up a text to his guy.

_ten bucks says somebody got bad food poisoning and you led the charge to pump his stomach_ , he’d joked. When Phil didn’t reply within a half-hour or so, he’d added, _call me and let me know how it all went_ before diving into a stack of waiting police reports.

If he’d checked his phone a whole lot in the first hour and a half of his work day, well, nobody needed to know that. If he’d drowned all his thoughts in coffee and three break room doughnuts (Banner birthday trivia of the week: the guy loves a chocolate-frosted cake doughnut), that was between him and the smear of chocolate frosting on his tie.

And if he’d practically tripped over himself during his conversation with Sif in a rush to grab his chiming phone off the corner of his desk—

“Is everything all right?” she’d asked, eyebrows raised, and Clint’d forced a smile as he’d unlocked his phone. The waiting text from Phil’d just read, _Call me when you can_ , and Clint’d stood there for a couple seconds, his heart sinking into his stomach. In the whole time he’d known Phil—as colleagues, as friends, as a whole lot more—he’d never received an intentionally vague one-line message like that. At least, not that he remembered.

He’d fired off a couple question marks and shoved his phone into his pants pocket. “Sorry about that,” he’d said, and dropped back into his desk chair. He’d flipped back through the charging document and witness list in front of him, trying to remember what the hell they were talking about, but Phil’s weird message kept distracting him. He’d eventually just said, “I’m pretty sure Fury’d kill me for agreeing to probation on a third felony.”

Sif’d frowned at him. “I talked to Coulson three times before he left for Denver, and probation was never on the table.”

“It—wasn’t?”

“No. The only thing we’re concerned about is concurrent sentences and trying to limit his restitution.” Clint’d rubbed a hand over his face, flipping back through Phil’s pages of notes, but the words swam together in his vision. He’d resisted his urge to double-check his phone. “Barton, if you’re not okay—”

“I’m fine,” he’d insisted, and slammed the file folder shut. Sif’s frown had deepened, crinkling her forehead, but he’d waved her off. “You want to talk concurrent sentences, let’s talk concurrent sentences. I’ll sort out what the hell’s going on with the case notes later.”

The scheduled hour-long meeting only lasted for half that, and Clint’d practically thrown the file at Darcy in his rush to step into the stairwell and call Phil.

Call Phil, and hear him say—

“This was supposed to be six weeks and fucking _done_ , Phil,” Clint spits down the phone, and he listens as Phil’s even breathing catches for a second. “You were supposed to help out your old buddy and come _home_. And now, all of a sudden, we’re on week eight and you’re spending the weekend anywhere but here!”

His voice rings out through the stairwell, tense and about three degrees louder than he means it to be, and he finally gives up and kicks a damn stair. On the other end of the phone, Phil’s perfectly still, his breathing almost inaudible. At the start of the conversation, he’d apologized quickly and stepped away from some background noise; now, Clint wonders whether he’s holed up in an office or stairwell of his own, his back pressed against some unfamiliar cinderblock wall as he listens to Clint yell down the phone at him.

The thought kinda deflates Clint, and he drops onto the nearest step. He rests his elbows on his thighs and rubs his neck for a second, just remembering how to breathe.

It’s a full minute later, maybe longer, when Phil asks, “Are you done now?” It’s gentle, a murmur more than anything else.

“I don’t know,” Clint admits, and he presses his temple against the cold, hard wall. On the other end of the line, Phil chuckles, and he grits his teeth. “That’s not fucking funny, you know.”

“No, but I’m glad I was still able to guess your answer,” Phil replies, and Clint rolls his eyes at him. They’re quiet again until Phil sighs in his ear. “I’m sorry,” he says, and it brims with the usual, heart-wrenching Phil genuineness that Clint fell stupidly in love with. “Dinner last night turned into a disaster, and I needed to finish up a few things back at the hotel room. I fell asleep on a stack of files—again.” Clint snorts a little laugh, and he thinks he can hear Phil smile. “Meredith will be back the first week of August, which is more than six weeks but still a lot shorter than forever.”

Clint shakes his head. “I’d hope you wouldn’t stick around there _forever_ , boss,” he half-jokes.

“That’s not the forever I’m interested in,” Phil replies quietly. Clint chokes on air, a dumb sputter that empties out his brain as much as his whole chest, and this time, Phil’s warm little chuckle is welcome, not infuriating. “I think I can wrap most of my work up this weekend,” he continues, his voice soft. “If I play my cards right, I might even be able to come home for the first half of next week and try to find my footing again. Provided you, Steve, and Natasha haven’t made me redundant, of course.”

“Natasha threatened to punch Laufeyson in the throat in open court and Steve’s a six-pack of Sam Adams away from a drinking problem,” Clint replies, and the knot of nerves in the pit of his stomach unwinds when Phil laughs. “Only one of those is true, by the way.”

“And since Steve prefers Heineken, I know which one,” Phil returns, and Clint allows himself one tiny, relieved smile. He manages to hold onto it until, a second later, Phil adds, “Are you okay?”

Clint snorts a little at the question and opens his eyes to stare up at the yellow emergency light that burns too bright in the otherwise-dark stairwell. The longer he stares at it, the more he thinks of other lights, too: headlights that stretch down their street, the dim porch light on their front stoop that attracts too many moths, tail lights that disappear into the darkness of a Tuesday night. He realizes a couple seconds too late that worry’s swept into the hole meant for his anger—and then, that the worry’s not totally focused on _Phil_. He considers admitting to all this right there in the stairwell, but then he pulls in a breath and discovers that he’s not sure how to start.

He shakes his head, instead. “I don’t know.”

On the other end of the line, Phil’s silent for a few heavy beats. “Is it something I can fix?” 

“Short of being here, no,” Clint replies, and he imagines Phil nodding through the ensuing quiet.

Phil promises to call after dinner that night—“Come hell or high water, and I mean it,” he vows, so incredibly determined that Clint can’t help but smile—and they linger through their goodbyes like teenagers after their first real date. When he finally leaves the stairwell, he feels wrung out and exhausted, like somebody just twisted his heart like a damp rag and hung it out to dry. He stops by the break room for a fresh cup of coffee and another of Bruce’s doughnuts— _three weeks ‘til the big 4-0!_ reads a label in Tony’s messy handwriting—but halfway back to his office, he decides he’s not hungry.

He leaves the doughnut on Jane’s desk and heads back to work.

He’s sorting through a stack of paperwork less than two minutes later when Darcy bursts in and unceremoniously slams a pile of pink message slips in the middle of his desk. “I was looking everywhere for you!” she announces, throwing up her hands and almost scattering the slips everywhere. “I went down to the courtrooms, I went to the clerk’s office, I sent Natasha up onto the _roof_ —”

“The roof?” 

“Uh, yeah. Thor hangs out there all the time. I thought maybe you made it a _thing_.” When he blinks at her, she rolls her eyes. “My point,” she presses, “is that Jessica Jones has called a half-dozen times in the last fifteen minutes, and I might go crazy if I need to take another message from her.”

Clint freezes, his coffee mug almost slipping from his fingertips. “Jessica Jones,” he repeats carefully.

Darcy nods. “That’s the one.”

“And she’s calling for me?”

“Uh, who else would she call for?” She shakes her head, her curls bouncing. “I told her you’re pretty swamped today, what with that felony DUI hearing this afternoon and everything, but she kind of ignored me.” She shrugs. “She finally just said you need to check your e-mail. I’m not sure how I feel about her.”

“You don’t have to feel anything about her,” Clint retorts immediately, and he swings around unlock his computer before she snaps back at him. His Outlook’s cluttered with a good thirty messages about Bruce’s birthday doughnuts; he quickly selects and deletes every new e-mail from **Stark, Anthony** , then hunts through the rest until he finds the one from Jones. It’s labeled with a red exclamation point, and his heart seizes up for a second when he realizes that the subject line reads _URGENT_ , capital letters and all.

He’s just about to open it when, out of nowhere, his desk phone rings. He almost shouts at Darcy to answer it, but a quick glance reveals that she’s already left his office and closed the door tightly behind her. He grabs the receiver, shouldering it roughly. “Clint Barton,” he answers, and twists back to the computer.

“Finally,” Jessica Jones says, sharp and breathless, and Clint knocks his mouse off the edge of his desk. “Where the hell have you been?”

“What’d she do?” he replies, halfway to talking over her. His voice is almost as rushed and clipped as hers.

On the other end of the line, Jones heaves a sigh. “I need to meet with you. Today, if you can.”

“Yeah, I kind of guessed that, but _why_?” The silence that stretches out between them is even worse than the silence from the stairwell. “Look, I know you’ve got your line. I don’t want you to cross it. But something’s going on with this kid, and if you can’t tell me, I can’t—”

“I know,” she interrupts. The words catch a little, and she clears her throat. “Trust me, okay? I _know_.” 

Clint nods, not that she can see it, and fights against the thick feeling in the back of his throat. It feels like he’s trying to breathe around some kind of craggy rock, and swallowing just chokes him. “What’d she do?” he asks again, quietly.

On the other end of the line, Jones stays silent for what feels like a hundred years. “I haven’t seen her in the last two weeks, Clint,” she finally answers, “and her friends won’t tell me what’s going on.”

 

==

 

“I don’t think I can protect her this time,” Jessica Jones says, and she pushes her daughter a little higher on the swings.

Danielle Cage is maybe two-and-a-half, her wild hair pulled into curly pigtails and a funny little SuperGirl t-shirt over her layered baby skirt, and she twists around in the swing to check and make sure her mother’s not disappeared in the last half-second. Jones clucks at her, pointing two fingers forward, and the girl flashes a toothy grin before she faces front again. 

“Her dad’s working late,” Jones’d apologized as Clint’d walked up to the white child services car parked in the elementary school parking lot and discovered a toddler in the backseat. The girl’d waved a chubby fist, and Clint’d carefully waved back. “Apparently, you can’t win the ‘pull your weight’ argument when your husband’s excuse is his job.”

Clint’d cracked the ghost of a smile. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he’d replied. The baby’d squealed at the sound of his voice, and he’d leaned against the open window. “Think she’ll blab about our conversation?” 

“She already repeats my curse words, so probably,” she’d retorted, and he’d laughed.

He’s not laughing now, even as a peewee soccer team runs laps around the schoolyard, their coach bellowing about hustle. The still-humid July breeze ruffles the leaves in the trees around them; in the parking lot, a harried-looking teacher cradles her cell phone against her shoulder as she unlocks a battered old Toyota. Clint soaks up the quiet as much as the heat, his stomach still churning and unbalanced from their conversation a couple hours earlier.

He’d eaten a dry sandwich at lunch without tasting it. He can’t remember half the questions he’d asked during his afternoon hearing.

And now, Jones sighs and shakes her head. “When she just missed the one therapy session, I ignored it,” she admits quietly. “They all skip every once in a while. It’s the price of doing a group like this with teenagers. Hell, I can’t count the number of times Teddy’s disappeared between the curb and our meeting room at Saint Andrews only to turn up at his boyfriend’s place.” She glances at Clint for a second, her eyes searching his face; it’s only after she turns away that he realizes she’d checked his expression for disapproval. “The second time, I called her cell phone, but she didn’t answer. The _third_ time, I pinned down America and Cassie after group. I would’ve grabbed Eli, too, but his grandmother runs a tight ship. America rattled off some _barrio_ bullshit about snitching and protecting your own, but Cassie—”

“Tall, blonde, works at a coffee shop?” Clint asks without thinking. Jones blinks at him for a second, and he shrugs. “She and Kate were at a park near my place. Cassie has boy trouble, I guess—”

Jones rolls her eyes. “Cassie has _grief_ trouble.”.

“—and Wade and I ran into them.” He presses his lips together as Jones returns to pushing her daughter. “Nobody said anything to us about skipping group.”

“You’re shocked by this?” she retorts, and Clint glances away. “Her step-mom called me after this last time,” she continues. “Apparently, the community service coordinator called to complain that Kate’d skipped out on all three orientation dates. I spun some story about group going fine, but—” She shakes her head. Worry floods her face for a second, and Clint feels his gut twist and turn. 

He slides his hands into his pockets and waits for the tense silence between them to snap in two. 

“Kate’s hardly coming home,” she says finally, her voice low. “Her dad’s in New York for at least the rest of the month, brokering some insane magazine deal. No surprise. But Heather can’t control her, Kate won’t speak to her, she shows up at midnight and then leaves again before Heather’s even finished her, I don’t know, do-it-yourself-pilates, and I—”

She stops then, the words trailing off into the breezy-hot summer air. Clint’s shoulders tense up without his permission, knotting like when he’d argued with Phil that morning. He curls his fingers into fists. “What do we do?” he asks.

Jones jerks around to look at him. “Excuse me?”

“To help keep her from falling all the way to pieces. What do we do?”

“No, I heard you, but I mean— What?” The baby swing nudges hard into her hip, and she swears under her breath as she steps out of the way. Danielle rides the momentum of the last couple pushes, babbling to herself, but Jones just keeps staring. “You’re the prosecuting attorney to whom I just reported a diversion violation. Actually, I think I reported two or three diversion violations, since she’s also ducking community service and skipping curfew.” Clint purses his lips. “I don’t know what _I_ do, but you file a motion to revoke the agreement and drag her in front of the judge.”

“As an attorney, yeah,” he replies. When she scowls at him, he reaches up and drags fingers through his sweat-damp hair. “But I’m not asking as Assistant District Attorney Barton. That guy’s had a hell of a month and needs a couple hours off. I’m asking as Clint.”

“Just as Clint?”

“Just as Clint,” he promises, and forces a tiny smile.

She raises her eyebrows, suspicion still lurking around the edges of her face, but then Danielle fusses in her barely-swaying baby swing and Jones turns away. The baby kicks and squirms at the first couple pushes, giggling, but Jones just sighs and shakes her head. “If she belonged to anyone else,” she explains, “I’d open a child welfare case on her and try to stave off the self-destruction before it burns down everything around it. But nobody in Suffolk County’s willing to touch Derek Bishop’s daughter with a fifty-foot pole. I can’t even convince a local therapist to try on her on for size—not that she’d agree to go,” she adds, and Clint almost smiles at that one. 

She pushes Danielle again, then tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “She’s scared,” she says after another couple seconds. “She won’t admit it or talk about it, but under everything else, she’s just a scared teenager who can’t wrap her head around what happened.”

Clint presses his lips together. “And you still can’t tell me what happened,” he says.

“No.”

“Or how you know she’s scared.”

Jones snorts, a bitter huff that echoes between them. “I was scared after it happened to me, too,” she replies quietly, and tickles the back of Danielle’s neck until she cackles.

Danielle’s resting her head against her mother’s shoulder as they walk to the car ten minutes later, her big brown eyes drifting slowly shut. Jones rolls down all her car windows before she hands the baby a stuffed animal and buckles her into her car seat; immediately, the girl tucks the toy under her chin and closes her eyes. Once she’s dozing, Jones leans against the side of the car and crosses her arms over her chest.

They stand there for a long time, Clint’s hands in his pockets and Jones’s arms crossed tightly, and Clint swears he counts a couple thousand tics of worry passing over her face. She rolls her lips together, digs her fingers into her arms, and crosses her legs at the ankles.

Clint just waits.

“Girls grow up hearing these lies,” she finally tells him, and tips her head away to watch her kid napping in the car. “From the time we’re old enough to walk, our parents and teachers and pastors feed us all the same bullshit: don’t talk to strangers, don’t pet strange dogs, keep your purse under your arm, always watch over your shoulder.” When he opens his mouth, she shoots him a fucking terrifying glare. “Don’t you dare turn this into the shared plight of the gay man, either. It’s different.”

He raises a hand. “Not saying a word.”

She stares him down for a couple more seconds before she nods to herself. “They lie to us until we believe them,” she continues, “and then, one day, the bubble bursts. For the first time, we find out that the armor we’ve bundled ourselves in for the last weeks—or months, or years, or decades, or three-quarters of our lives—is like the emperor’s new clothes in the fairy tale, a story we believed because it was easy.” Her fingernails leave tiny half-moon crescents on her pale arms. “It’s a lot harder to believe, after that.”

Jones is quiet for a long time, her voice lifted away by the breeze, before Clint asks, “How old were you when you stopped believing?”

She snorts a little, shaking her head, and lifts her eyes slowly. They watch each other in the parking lot, separated by three feet of July air and a whole lifetime of experience, and Clint’s stomach twists itself into a knot. He remembers bruises from fights and nasty words sneered in the high school bathroom, sure, but he’s pretty sure none of that compares to the lies somebody told a young, bright-eyed Jessica Jones.

She only breaks eye contact with him when she pushes away from the side of the car, fishing the keys out of her pocket as she crosses to the driver’s side. “I was nineteen,” she replies, and wrenches the door open. Clint thinks she’ll end the conversation there, a quick non-answer to the thousands of questions swimming around in his head, but then she glances at him over the car roof. “I was nineteen,” she says again, “but Kate was two weeks from her sixteenth birthday—and that makes it much, much worse.”

 

==

 

Friday morning, Clint buys his coffee at the shop across from the judicial complex.

He waits ‘til Hill’s boring boy intern and his grinny little friend from IT leave before he heads in, the girl chattering while the intern rolls his eyes, and once he’s through the door, he’s immediately smacked in the face by the smell of strong coffee. It’s a small shop, the kind with a public bookshelf and a couple shared, free-to-all newspapers spread out on one of the tables by the door, and Clint basks in the warmth for a couple seconds. Behind the counter, a tall blonde scrubs down the foam-stick thing on the espresso machine, humming to herself. 

Her thick blonde ponytail sways against her back.

“Can I get a large black coffee?” Clint asks after a couple seconds, and the girl jumps so hard that the machine rattles. For a beat, they stare at each other, Clint smiling a little and the girl blinking; then, recognition dawns on her face and she flinches back a half step. She crosses her arms, inadvertently propping up her too-big nametag, and tosses a glance toward the back room.

“Cassie—”

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk to you,” she says sharply. “Kate said you’re the prosecutor, which means—”

“I’m not here as a prosecutor,” he promises, and raises his hands. Cassie’s jaw tightens, her lower lip caught between her teeth. “I talked to Jessica Jones the other day, and now I want to talk to you. Hopefully with a large black coffee.”

He forces another smile, and Cassie narrows her eyes. She uncrosses her arms slowly, like she’s tearing down a whole line of defense. “Kate said you’re not like other lawyers,” she says carefully.

He snorts. “She’s not wrong about that,” he replies, and Cassie nods as she starts putting together his drink.

After meeting up with Jessica at the elementary school, he’d skipped out on pretty much his whole normal Wednesday routine to paw back through Kate Bishop’s file. He’d treated it like his first fake case file for his law school trial advocacy class, skimming over everything before sorting through it with a fine-toothed comb. He’d eaten dinner while highlighting and annotating all the damn police reports from the house party, drank a beer as he scribbled down brand-new case notes, and stepped out of a quick evening shower to review all the information on Kate’s five victims. He’d just about flipped one of those Costco boxes over on the coffee table and started charting out the case when his phone’d chimed, and he’d answered it distractedly without glancing at the caller ID.

“I feel like I’m interrupting,” Phil’d greeted, and Clint’d stopped eyeing the box to find his watch. He’d only rubbed his eyes after he’d realized that it was after ten. “Are you still out with Bruce and Natasha? Because I can call—”

“I didn’t go,” Clint’d answered immediately. Phil’s voice’d dropped off, and he’d sighed. “Not like that,” he’d clarified, flopping back on the couch. “Jessica Jones called me about the Bishop case. I decided to go back to the beginning.”

He’d sworn he could hear Phil’s frown. “I thought you already did that.”

“Yeah, well, I’m redoing it.”

“Can I ask why?”

“If I had an answer, sure,” Clint’d mumbled back. He’d dragged his fingers through his hair at Phil’s silence. “She’s violated pretty much every term of her diversion,” he’d said after a few seconds, shaking his head. “I think Jones wants me to move on her, file a motion to revoke and drag her back in front of Judge Smithe. But I do that, and my credibility with her flies right out the window.”

“You’re a criminal prosecutor, not a social worker,” Phil’d replied quietly, and Clint’d tried to ignore how much it felt like a kick to the damn stomach. He’d rolled his head back against the couch cushion and stared up at the ceiling. “I know you want to help her, but that’s not your role right now. If she’s violating the terms of her diversion, you need to hold her accountable. It’s your _job_.”

“I’m pretty sure Bruce’d say that my job’s to help the kid.”

“This isn’t a child welfare case. It’s a criminal proceeding.” Clint’d sighed and closed his eyes. “Clint,” Phil’d pressed, his voice quiet and gentle enough that Clint could almost imagine him in the same room, “you might not be able to be the hero in this case.”

He’d snorted. “Yeah, ‘cause I’m really hero material.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, and you know it,” Phil’d retorted, and Clint’d gone back to staring at nothing. “We want to be the heroes. Uphold truth, justice, and the American way.”

“Okay, Steve.”

Phil’d paused a beat at that, and Clint’d smirked imagining his pointed little half-glare. “We want the best of all possible scenarios, but sometimes, all we can do is make the best of a bad situation. Maybe that’s just what Kate Bishop is.”

Clint’d nodded a little at that, not really answering, and sat up to stare at the papers spread all over the coffee table. The whole mess’d looked like something out of Dot Barnes’s art box, all rainbow highlighting and incoherent scribbles. He’d rolled his lips together before he finally shook his head. “I think they did something to her, Phil,” he’d said, and his own voice’d sounded distant and disconnected. “I don’t know what, but these guys, the ones she beat up— I think they hurt her, somehow.”

For a long time, Phil’d stayed quiet on the other end of the line, his breath low and even. Finally, he asked, “Can you prove it?”

Clint’d swallowed. “No.”

“Then you might just need to make the best of the bad situation,” he’d said again, and they’d promptly stopped talking about Kate Bishop.

“I’m going on break!” Cassie shouts suddenly, and Clint jerks out of his memories in time to catch the girl stripping out of her smock. She tosses it over her shoulder as she heads around the counter, and then, wordlessly, tips her head toward the front door. Clint nods a little and leads her out into the muggy July morning. The forecast keeps promising rain, and he thinks sometimes he can taste the storm every time he inhales.

As soon as they’re out in the open, Cassie heads down the sidewalk in the direction of the park, and Clint quick helps himself to a gulp of his coffee before he follows her. She shoves her hands in her back pockets as she walks, and for a second, neither of them says a word.

“You want to know what’s up with Kate, right?” she finally asks. When he nods, she nods right back, her eyes fixed straight ahead. “I figured somebody would. She— I sometimes don’t think she realizes how it is for everybody else around her, you know? She’s so caught up in Kate-land that she misses how the rest of us crash and burn.”

He rolls his lips together. “You’re crashing and burning?” 

“I—” Cassie starts, but the rest of the words rush out as a sigh. She shakes her head; when she steps off the sidewalk, Clint follows. “If we were a team, Kate’d be our leader,” she explains, fresh-cut grass clinging to her sneakers, “but I don’t think she sees it that way. She just plunges forward, all the time, and only stops when she’s ready. And that’s great at group—Jess always says she ‘pushes us to do better,’ whatever that means—and fun when we’re out, but when she goes all lone wolf on us . . . ”

She trails off, the words drifting away into the summer air, and Clint only realizes that she’s led them to a picnic table once she’s sat on top of it. She plants her feet on the bench and leans down to pick grass off the ends of her jeans. When the sunlight through the trees flashes on her face, though, he can read all the worry and fear trapped there.

He sits down on the bench, his shoulder a foot or so from her knee, and sips his coffee. “She’s gone lone wolf?” he asks.

“It’s what she does,” Cassie replies. She rests her elbows on her legs and glances over at Clint. “She jokes a lot about how we’re all loners, but almost all of us have _somebody_ else, you know? Teddy has his boyfriend, America has a whole bunch of friends she’ll never introduce us to, Eli’s involved in all these community groups with his grandparents.” She shakes her head. “But Kate— I don’t know if she has many friends outside of group. And I think it’s easy for her to forget that we count.”

Clint nods slightly, the heat from the coffee seeping into his palms, and watches as Cassie worries her lip between her teeth again. “Jessica talks all the time about how we’re survivors, fighting against adversity or something,” she says after a couple seconds, “but I mostly think we make each other survivors. And we can’t do that if we run off on our own.”

“Have you told Kate that?”

She snorts. “Yeah, because Kate Bishop takes constructive criticism _so_ well,” she retorts, and Clint can’t help cracking a smile. She grins back, her face bright and young in the sunlight, and then drops her eyes to her folded hands. She stares at them for a long time before she adds, “I don’t know where she goes.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Goes?”

“When she skips out on Heather or whatever. I mean, that’s what you wanted to ask me, right? Where she is, what she’s doing?” When she glances over, Clint nods. She sighs a little, shaking her head. “I think I’ve seen her car a couple times at night, but my mom’s kind of psycho about things like curfew. I sneak out to talk to anybody, even Kate, and I’ll be grounded for the rest of my life.” 

“You think that’s all she does?” he asks, and Cassie frowns at him. “Drives around at night, comes home late to avoid her step-mom?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think she’s told anybody else what she spends her nights doing?”

Cassie shakes her head instead of answering.

It’s only after he’s walked her back to the coffee shop, sweat seeping through his dress shirt and his too-big coffee most the way empty, that Cassie really meets his eyes again. For the first time, her expression’s wide open, and he’s caught up for a second in the fear living in her bright eyes. He realizes all at once that Kate’s the hurricane from that rain quote pinned up in Darcy’s cubicle: strong, wild, and inescapable.

He wonders whether Kate’s figured that out about herself, yet.

“She never told me,” Cassie volunteers, and he blinks out of his own thoughts before frowning at her. She shrugs. “Group’s about sharing whatever needs shared so you can cope with your trauma, according to Jess,” she explains. “Kate talks a lot about her mom, and Heather, and her sister, but I always thought she’d tell us the other stuff when she was ready.”

He picks at the lid of his coffee for a couple seconds before he asks, “And you’re sure there’s other stuff?” 

Cassie snorts at him. “If you’ve met her, you _know_ there’s other stuff,” she returns, and he grins a little as she disappears back into the coffee shop.

 

==

 

The doorbell rings at one-thirty Saturday morning. 

It jolts Clint right out of a dead sleep, and he remembers a half-second too late that he’d conked out on the couch instead of heading to his nice, comfortable bed. He ends up banging his elbow on the coffee table and muttering a whole lot of curses, but at least he avoids crashing to the floor.

On the TV, some infomercial moron scalds himself draining spaghetti.

For a couple seconds, Clint just sits there, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and stretching the crick out of his neck. Aside from the television, the house is dark and quiet, as still and calm as when he’d nodded off during Sports Center. Sandy’s dozing on the armchair by the window, her face tucked under a paw, and Clint’s mess of paperwork still covers the coffee table. He runs a hand through his sleep-mussed hair and, after a little digging, rescues the remote from between two couch cushions and switches it off.

The whole house plunges into darkness.

And the doorbell chimes again.

He’s not sure why the sound of it—just that one button-push in the darkness, no frantic pounding or shouting behind it—drags him up off the couch and toward the front door. He thinks for a second he should find his cell phone and call the cops or hunker down in one of the rooms facing the front of the house and wait till the culprit drives off, but he never stops walking. No, instead of doing all the sensible things he learned growing up in the park with Barney and Trick, he walks right up to the door and unlocks it.

From the porch, Kate Bishop stares at him, wide-eyed and wild-haired.

He’s struck for a second by how much she looks like something out of a fairy tale, her dark hair tossed by the summer wind and her skin too pale in the porch light. He imagines parents a hundred years ago weaving stories around manic pixie dream girls like Kate Bishop, warning against their siren songs. Thunder rumbles in the distance, fat rain drops spitting down out of thick storm clouds, and Kate wraps her arms around her torso.

She’s wearing a black windbreaker and running shorts, and when the wind shifts in Clint’s direction, he realizes how much she smells like smoke and sun. 

“You can’t be here,” he says without thinking, and she jerks her head up toward him. Something brief and frightened clouds her eyes for a second, and he shakes his head. “Not like that,” he says quickly, “just— I talked to Jessica, Kate. I know you haven’t—”

“I know,” she agrees. She brushes hair out of her face, but the wind sweeps it back into place. “She left a hundred messages for me.”

“Then you should—”

“Just shut up, okay?” she snaps, and he shuts his mouth. She uncoils slowly, her hands finding her pockets. She shifts her weight around, rocking to the balls of her feet and off again; her shoulders tighten and loosen reflexively, and all while she avoids his eyes. “I know I shouldn’t be here,” she says finally, shaking her head a little. “I drove past your house a couple times because I figured you’d be pissed. But I just— I needed a half-second around someone who gives a fuck.”

She steals a tiny glance in his direction as she says it, like a kid Dot’s age checking to see if her parents are watching, and Clint swallows hard at the weird feeling that climbs up the back of his throat. “Jessica gives a fuck,” he says after a couple seconds.

Kate snorts. “She’s different.”

“I don’t—”

“She just is, okay?” she cuts him off, and he nods.

The thunder growls again, louder this time, and the sky immediately opens up in a hard, steady downpour. Kate steps more fully onto the stoop, ducking under the eaves enough to shield herself from the rain; Clint steps back a little and lets the screen door slam shut, allowing her a couple feet more space. She looks dream-hazy through the screen and somehow smaller, her hands digging further into her pockets. Clint spends a second trying to drum up some kind of response and fill space between them with something besides the rain, but the words escape him as soon as they touch the back of his tongue.

They stand there a long time—Kate staring out across the row of manicured lawns, Clint staring at _Kate_ —before he pulls in a breath and asks, “You wanna come in?”

She flinches a little at that, jerking toward him like she’s recoiling from a slap, and he shrugs. “I mean, with the rain and everything, you could—”

“No, I can’t,” she replies, shaking her head. He thinks maybe the corners of her lips curl into a tiny smile. “Prosecutorial police, remember? I don’t want to get you in trouble. Plus, like you said, I can’t actually be here.”

“No,” he agrees, “you can’t.”

She nods at that, a tiny bob of her chin, and her eyes find his through the screen. For a split second, she’s Derek Bishop’s defiant kid again, standing in the autumn wind and teasing Clint about the cut of his slacks—but then, that girl disappears. She flips the hood of her jacket up over her hair and zips the whole thing up to her chin; her skin looks ten times paler for it.

She’s just twisting away from him, her body tilted out toward the pouring rain, when he blurts, “Take care of yourself, okay?” She stops, her face tilted down toward the step and her whole body tense. “I don’t know what you’re doing, or what’s going on,” he admits, “but Jessica’d kill me if I didn’t at least say that much. Cassie, too.”

Kate nods. When she turns just far enough toward him that he can glimpse her face, he’s struck by the sadness that’s captured there—and by how quickly it fades when she flashes him a sly smile. “You so need to stop hanging out with teenage girls,” she tells him.

He snorts. “I’ll consider it,” he replies, and she grins at him for a half-second longer before she disappears into the rain.

He waits till she’s in her car to step out onto the stoop, and he stands there with the spray of the downpour chilling his face and arms as her headlights flare to life and she pulls out of the driveway. For a long time, he stays outside, staring out at the rain and waiting for the purple VW to reappear.

It doesn’t.

 

==

 

“We’re here this morning in the matter of State versus K.E.B., a juvenile born in 1996,” Judge Smithe says, her tone clipped and curt. She flips the file folder flat on the bench and folds her hands on top of it. “Appearances, please.”

“Your honor, if we could maybe just start, you know, way back at the beginning of how we got here today, and avoid—”

“Appearances, Mister Wilson,” the judge snaps, and Wade clamps his mouth shut hard enough that Clint swears he hears the guy’s teeth click.

It’s just after ten in the morning at the judicial complex, and if Clint listens carefully, he can hear the thunder rattling beyond the walls of Judge Dunbar’s courtroom. He’d hovered in the back of the room while Steve ran through the Saturday morning first appearances, most of them stemming from an ugly brawl down by the trailer park where Clint’d grown up, and he’d tried to ignore the way his gut kept twisting into knots. He’d reviewed the half-assed police report from the night before and attempted to ignore the familiar, clipped quality of Steve’s lawyer voice.

It hadn’t really worked, but he’d tried.

He’d jerked awake just after seven that morning to the mixed sounds of the rain pounding down on the roof and his cell phone ringing on the bedside table. He’d stretched out across the bed, groping around for the damn thing, and answered blindly.

He’d also shoved his face back into the nearest pillow, which explained why Steve’d asked, “Clint? Clint, are you there?” instead of trying on an actual hello.

Clint’d forced himself to roll over onto his back. Rubbing a hand across his face’d only reminded him of how long he’d stood out on the front porch—and how poorly he’d slept once he’d collapsed into bed. “Please tell me this is a bad dream and I can go right back to sleep,” he’d mumbled.

Steve’d released a humorless little breath. “I know it’s early, but I need you.”

“I’m not the on-call attorney for another three weeks, so how do you—”

“This isn’t about being on call,” Steve’d cut him off. Something tight and urgent had leaked into his tone, and Clint’d forced his bleary eyes open. “The police picked up a juvenile last night. I figured they’d want to release her back to her parents, but her step-mother won’t accept her back unless she promises to stay put, and her father’s—”

“A disinterested asshole?” he’d asked. Steve’s voice had dropped away into a heavy, uncomfortable silence, and Clint’d rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. He’d laid there for a couple seconds, trying to convince himself that Steve’d just called him as backup, an extra body to fill the courtroom at the hearing. 

The longer Steve’d stayed quiet, the harder it’d been to believe that lie.

Finally, he’d sighed. “It’s Kate, isn’t it?” he’d asked softly.

“It is,” Steve’d answered, his voice just as low and careful, “and I thought you might want to handle it.”

In the harsh fluorescent light of Judge Dunbar’s courtroom—the only courtroom open for Saturday first appearances, a behemoth of polished wood and faux-velvet theater seating in the gallery—Clint pushes to his feet. He glances one last time at the police reports before he says, like always, “The State appears by Clinton Barton, your honor.”

“And the juvenile’s here, in person and in custody, with her attorney Wade Wilson,” Wade recites.

At counsel table, sitting beside a detective with a shock of white hair, Kate tosses her head. Dressed in the standard-issue sweatpants and t-shirt from the juvenile detention hall, she looks about three sizes smaller than usual; the boxy shirt hangs off her shoulders wrong, and the sweatpants bunch around her ankles. She’s not shackled, but she drags her feet back and forth along the carpet like she might be. She stares at the tabletop even after Wade sits down and scoots closer to her, and when he murmurs something, she snorts and shakes her head.

At the bench, Judge Smithe watches her for a long, long time. Clint ends up looking away, frowning at the police reports and ignoring the sinking feeling in his gut.

Finally, the judge clears her throat. “As I understand it,” she says slowly, “we’re here today because someone reported Miss Bishop as a runaway.” Kate releases a huffy little breath, and Clint glances up in time to watch the judge’s jaw tighten. “Juvenile Detective Munroe recovered the juvenile at a twenty-four hour doughnut shop on the far east side of town and brought her to juvenile detention. When the Bishops were called, they apparently said—”

“Actually, your honor, uh, that’s not really right?” Wade interrupts, and Clint realizes a second too late that the guy’s standing at defense table. He glances down at Kate, then fixes his eyes back up on Judge Smithe. “According to my client—who, by the way, isn’t telling me a whole lot right now, which I think’ll be a conversation for a different hearing—”

“The point, Mister Wilson?” the judge asks tightly.

Wade flinches a little. “Yeah, sorry. The point is that Kate wants everybody to know that _only_ her step-mom made the decision, and that her dad hasn’t even heard about all this.”

One of the gallery chairs bangs all of a sudden, and Clint twists around just as Heather Bishop plants her hands on the bar that separates the gallery from the well of the courtroom. She’s dressed in yoga pants and a strappy tank-top, leaving nothing to the imagination, but her face is bare and her eyes are red. Her fingernails dig into the wood. “I’m sorry, but that’s _not_ true,” she exclaims, her voice shaking. “Kate, I know you don’t trust me, but I called your father, and he said—”

“Now is _not_ the time, Mrs. Bishop,” Judge Smithe interrupts, and Heather snaps her pink lips shut. At counsel table, Kate rotates her chair until it’s pointed almost totally at the wall, hiding her face from view. Heather curls her hands into fists before sinking back into her seat. The judge waits for her to settle before she sighs. “Regardless of who the police talked to,” she continues, “Detective Munroe came away with the distinct impression that the Bishops don’t think Kate will come home on time in the evening or follow the rules of the home—which I believe is also a condition of the diversion agreement in this case.” Kate crosses her arms over her chest, her body still angled toward the wall; when Clint finally glances away from her back and messy ponytail, he realizes that the judge is watching him. “Did I miss anything?”

He shakes his head. “Not really,” he replies, rising from his seat. He glances out across the gallery at Jessica Jones, who raises her chin a couple centimeters. He rolls his lips together. “I’d just add that, as far as the State understands it, Miss Bishop’s broken a bunch of the conditions of her diversion agreement. I’d need to talk to Miss Jones and Mrs. Bishop to get a better estimate of what exactly she’s not doing, but she’s definitely out of compliance. And also,” he adds, clearing his throat a little, “Detective James Howlett faxed over a police affidavit about an hour ago. Apparently, he got called to a home in the Carriage Hill area of town, where three teenagers all reported that their cars got keyed overnight.”

The judge frowns. “And that’s relevant?”

Clint swallows. His gut tangles into another impossible knot, and he works hard to breathe around it. “The teenagers are three of Miss Bishop’s victims: Cody Miller, Brandon Perkins, and Dylan—”

“I didn’t do _that_!” a voice exclaims suddenly, and Clint twists away from his table just as Kate bursts out of her chair like somebody spring-loaded her. Detective Munroe tries to catch her arm, but she dances out of the way; she knocks into Wade’s chair, and he grabs the edge of the defense table to keep from spinning out of control. “I swear, I didn’t _touch_ their cars, I wouldn’t go near them if my life depended on it and you can’t—”

“ _Kate_ ,” Jones snaps, and Kate whirls around on her heel to stare at the social worker. Panic floods her face, her eyes blooming wide and helpless, but Jones just shakes her head. Kate’s throat bobs as she swallows, and when the detective wraps a hand around her arm, she practically melts into her grip. She collapses back into her vinyl chair and hides her face in her hands. The detective opens her mouth, but Jones shakes her head a second time. 

The detective purses her lips before she settles back into her seat. Jones hovers for a moment. In front of her, Kate’s shoulders shake.

Judge Smithe waits until Jones slides back into her creaky gallery chair before she asks, “Are you ready to charge the juvenile with the vandalism?”

“No,” Clint answers honestly. “Detective Howlett needed to handle a couple things at the station and then he’s meeting with Mister Rogers and me this afternoon. If we’re going to charge her, we’ll know by Monday morning.”

The judge nods curtly. “And you want her detained until then?”

Clint’s stomach churns and, very slowly, he glances over at Kate. She’s pulled her face out of her hands but she’s still folded in on herself, her fingers balled in her too-big t-shirt and her eyes staring straight ahead at the big metal state seal on the front of the judge’s bench. Her shoulders lift and fall almost erratically, and for a second, Clint’s whole body aches for her. He remembers the uncomfortable fucking chair in the Clarion County courthouse and the way his attorney, a pot-bellied guy who smelled like garlic and Old Spice, rolled his eyes every time he started to talk. Worse, he remembers the cold, unblinking glare of the older-than-dirt judge, and the way he’d almost thrown up all over his own shoes when Trick’d snorted and responded to a question about locking Clint up with, “Sure, whatever.”

He’s still wading his way out of those memories when the judge asks, “Mister Barton?” When he glances up, she raises her eyebrows at him. “Do you want Miss Bishop detained until you charge her with vandalism?”

Clint shakes his head. “No,” he replies, “but until her parents think they can control her at home and I can figure out whether we need to revoke her diversion, I don’t think we have much of a choice.”

Wade rambles through a long, messy argument in response, one that talks a lot about fundamental fairness, second chances, and, at one point, the newest _Star Trek_ movie, but when he rests, Judge Smithe tips her head toward him. “That’s all fine and good, Mister Wilson,” she says, her mouth almost quirking into a smile, “but your client’s parents aren’t willing to take her home.”

Kate’s shoulders slump slightly. Standing next to her, Wade frowns. “Yeah, but the standard isn’t whether her parents want her, it’s whether she’ll be a danger to herself or others or whether she’ll show up for the next hearing, and—”

“And you can personally guarantee that she won’t leave the shelter or any other temporary placement?” the judge interrupts. 

Wade pauses for a second. “No,” he finally admits, “I can’t.” 

He ends his argument right after that.

The judge nods a little to herself once Wade’s flopped back into his seat, his hair standing almost on end from him messing with it during his argument, and after a couple beats of silence, Smithe swivels her chair to fully face Kate. Unlike during the last couple hearings, the girl stays half-slouched and tucked into herself. The judge frowns. “If you have anything to say, Kate, now is your chance to—”

“I don’t,” she answers quickly, and Clint’s sure he hears her voice shake.

Judge Smithe nods for a moment, her gaze still fixed on the girl at the defense table. When she releases her breath, it rushes out in a tired, quiet sigh. Without her long, thick braid or her glasses, Clint can see the gray at her temples and the dark circles rimming her eyes. “Well, Kate, Mister Wilson correctly explained the standard for holding you in juvenile detention,” she says, turning to the file spread out in front of her. “You either need to be a danger to yourself, a danger to others, or you need to be in a position where I don’t think you’ll come to your next hearing. I don’t know what I’d decide if you’d only run off for a night—I’m not condoning that, but I remember being a teenager—but that’s not the end of this. I have your parents saying that they’re not sure they can trust you, the State telling me you’re out of compliance with the diversion, _and_ possible pending criminal charges involving your victims.”

For the first time since her outburst, Kate’s shoulders stiffen. “I didn’t go near those as—”

“Maybe you didn’t,” the judge interrupts, and Kate snaps her jaw shut, “but it’d be a lot easier to disprove that if you’d come home last night.” Kate drops her eyes to the tabletop, but Clint thinks her little head-bob counts as half a nod. “I told you during your first hearing that if you broke any of the rules, you wouldn’t get to stay at home. From what I’ve heard today, you didn’t just break one rule, you broke all of them.” She shakes her head. “Kate Bishop, I am detaining you in the juvenile detention center until Monday afternoon. If the State doesn’t charge you for vandalism, you’ll be released at the end of the day. If you’re charged, we’ll have another hearing and I’ll hear more arguments on whether you can go home.” 

She pauses for a moment, her hands resting on the file. “I am also seriously suggesting that, unless something tremendous happens to turn you around and prove you deserve a second chace, the State move to revoke your diversion agreement.” Kate’s head snaps back up, her eyes wide with surprise; Judge Smithe meets them easily, her whole face stony. “I agreed to it grudgingly before,” she says, “and given your blatant disrespect to everyone in this room—everyone who’s pulled for you for the last eight weeks—I’m not sure how I feel about it now.”

Kate sucks in a hard breath. “But—”

“There’s no ‘buts,’ Miss Bishop,” the judge returns, shaking her head. “We’re adjourned.”

The court reporter instructs all of them to rise as the judge leaves the courtroom, but even when everybody around her shuffles to their feet, Kate stays rooted in her seat. Wade touches her shoulder lightly, but she jerks away; when Munroe reaches out, too, she slides her chair back until it hits the bar behind her and crosses her arms. It’s only after the secure door to the courtroom closes and Jessica Jones leans down to murmur something to her that the girl finally stands, her chest puffed out in indignation.

Except Clint knows that indignation from his own court case, all those years ago. And he knows all the fear that lurks underneath it, too.

“Mister Wilson and I will come see you,” Jones says audibly, and Kate snorts before she stares at the nearest wall. A sorta sticky silence settles over the courtroom as Munroe gently puts a hand against Kate’s back and leads her off. She stares straight ahead for most of her march out of the courtroom, but somewhere around the last row of the gallery, she tosses a glance over her shoulder and finds Clint’s eyes.

Clint nods at her for a second, and she rolls her lips together before the detective leads her out of the courtroom.

The doors swing shut behind her. Outside the courthouse, thunder crackles.

“So,” Wade says, drawing out the one syllable like he’s stretching silly putty to its damn breaking point, “that went super well.”

Clint snorts. “Shut the hell up, Wade,” he retorts, and he pretends like the knot in his stomach isn’t choking him breathless.

 

==

 

A half-hour later, Clint’s sitting in his office and rereading the pile of police reports from Howlett when his cell phone chimes. He ignores it at first, his fingers of one hand buried in his hair while he highlights over one of Cody’s statements, but when it chimes again a few minutes later, he sighs and bends to drag it out of his bag. The rain splatters against his window, uneven beats that creep under his skin the longer he works, and he checks his watch as he unlocks his phone.

He’s still got another fifteen or twenty minutes to kill before Howlett, Munroe, and Steve all converge on the building to talk about the vandalism—and, he thinks, about Kate.

He’s so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he opens the new text messages without checking who they’re from. When he sees the name—and then, better still, when he reads the messages—he feels like he’s breathing again for the first time all day.

**Phil Coulson:** _I’m officially coming home on Monday. I’ll need to spend two days in Denver the week after next to cover a hearing, but other than that, I’m officially done._

**Phil Coulson:** _I hope your silence implies that you’re doing that obscene victory dance you usually save for Black Ops II._

Clint snorts a little, an amused smile nudging at his mouth mostly against his will, but when he thumbs open a new text message, his brain totally blanks. He stares at the conversation bubbles for a long time before he figures out what he wants to say.

_i really wish you were here today, boss_ , he finally types.

He’s only one sentence farther down the page when Phil’s response chimes through.

_I wish I was home, too_ , it says, and Clint stares at it a long, long time.


	13. Truths, Half-Truths, and Kate Bishop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, Clint finally sees a chink in Kate Bishop’s perfectly constructed armor—and somebody else maybe finds a chink in Clint’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for less-vague references to assault against women. 
> 
> The meeting between Clint, Thor, and the juvenile offender in this chapter is probably a little unrealistic, but as I always say: creative license!
> 
> Thanks as always to my wonderful, wonderful beta-readers, Jen and saranoh. They catch different errors, they always have good comments, and they make my words better.

“You got a couple minutes to talk about Kate Bishop?” a voice asks, and Clint looks up to find Detective Howlett looming in his office doorway.

The crappy summer storm outside the window’s pretty much faded out to persistent drizzle, the sort of dreary gray mist that reminds you of how you could be on your couch watching shitty TV instead of holed up in your office. Clint’d considered heading back home after the meeting with Steve and the two detectives, trading out his suit for some sweats and quality time with the DVR, but his brain’d kept nagging him about this godforsaken case. He’d trekked all the way out to the parking lot, stood next to his car for a minute, and ended up only dropping his bag and suit jacket on the back seat before running back inside. He’s now knee-deep in the police reports from Kate’s big night as a runaway all over again, highlighter clenched between his teeth.

And judging from the damp clinging to Howlett’s messy hair and the shoulders of his shirt, he’s not the only one with the nagging brain.

“Sure,” he says, capping up his highlighter and swinging his feet down off the pile of pillows. “You want anything? Coffee, halfway-stale break room bagel?”

Howlett raises his eyebrows. “Depends. Your coffee more of that brown water Rogers makes?”

Clint can’t help his little grin. “According to Steve, that’s the one true coffee.” Howlett snorts softly and shakes his head. “Luckily, I know how to make the real stuff.”

“As long as it actually tastes like _something_ , I’m game,” the detective returns, and he tosses himself into one of Clint’s armchairs as Clint heads off to brew a proper pot of coffee.

The office’s empty and quiet as Clint wanders through it, all blacked-out computer monitors and closed doors, and he tries not to dwell too hard on that as he flicks on the break room lights and digs Stark’s bag of fancy coffee out from its latest hiding place behind the bargain-sized box of plastic trash bags. The whole place’d felt oppressive as he and Steve’d set up for their impromptu meeting, brewing coffee and digging out pens and note pads to toss on the conference room table. It’d felt a little like cleaning up ten seconds before the guests arrived to check out your place, but he’d bit that back and grinned when the detectives showed. 

The grin hadn’t lasted too long.

“We don’t have any hard-and-fast proof that Miss Bishop is the vandal,” Detective Munroe’d explained shortly after she sat down, a Styrofoam cup of coffee pressed between her palms. “By the time I found her, she was already uncooperative. I tried to ask her the basic questions—where she’d gone besides the doughnut shop, who she’d spent her time with, why she ran—but she refused to answer.”

“We’ve heard that about her,” Steve’d said, and Clint’d felt his jaw twitch. He’d kept his eyes trained down on his legal pad and the stack of police reports, working hard to hold his face even. “Do you have any indication of who else might have wanted to mess with these kids? Other kids from school? High school sports rivals?”

“Nothing they’re telling us,” Howlett’d responded, shrugging. “According to the three of them—and Perkins’s mom, who called us in—the boys were playing video games all night while their folks were at some kind of benefit.”

“The McAdams House fundraiser?” Steve’d asked, and both detectives had frowned at him. He’d shaken his head quickly, but Clint’d caught a hint of red on the tips of his ears. “Tony Stark’s been talking a lot about it for the last couple weeks,” he’d explained once everybody’d kept staring at him. “It’s practically a who’s who of the charitable rich in this part of the state.”

“It’s terrifying you know that,” Clint’d informed him, and flashed a mostly-innocent grin as Steve’d narrowed his eyes. 

Munroe, however, had nodded slightly. “It’s also where Heather Bishop was for most of last night,” she’d supplied. Next to her, Howlett’d snorted into his coffee, but she’d ignored it. “It’s why she waited so long to report Kate missing—she wasn’t home to notice.”

“Sounds like there’s a lot of that going around,” Howlett’d commented. He’d set his cup down and leaned forward, arms on the table. “Charity ball or not, the point is, the boys swore they were in all night. They didn’t cause anybody trouble, nobody’s got a problem with them, and the only person they’ve got problems with is whoever keyed their cars.” He’d glanced right at Clint. “One of them said he thought he saw a girl walking by around the time their pizza showed up, but he couldn’t really remember.”

Steve’d stopped scribbling notes and glanced up at the detective. “You think there’s any truth to that?”

“To the mystery girl, or to their perfect night in?” 

“Either one.”

“No.” The detective’d leaned back, hooking one elbow over the back of his chair, and Clint’d swallowed hard around the weird lump that kept swelling in the back of his throat. “I think they’re rich little shits who spent the night smoking weed and drinking their parents’ booze. But I don’t know about the girl.”

Steve’d rolled his lips together and finished off his line of notes. A couple beats of quiet’d swept over the room before Clint’d heard himself ask, “You really think nobody’s got a problem with those guys?” The words had sounded rough, almost gravelly, and he’d cleared his throat while both Steve and Howlett’d tipped their heads at him. “I don’t know how much of high school you guys remember—”

“I tried to black most of it out,” Steve’d admitted with a sideways little grin.

“—but from what I know about Kate’s victims, they’re in that circle of popular kids where maybe more people hate them than they realize.” Munroe’d frowned at him over the lip of her cup, and he’d shrugged. “I just mean, the star jock school-runners aren’t always great to the rest of their classmates. Plenty of people could have an issue with them.”

“You mean besides Kate Bishop?” Howlett’d asked.

“Sure. Because if they pissed her off enough that she started a brawl, who knows what they’ve done to the rest of her class, or her friends, or—” 

“With respect, Mister Barton,” Munroe’d interrupted, a hint of an accent clipping the ends of her words, “she spent all night unsupervised. She has a standing issue with these boys. I’m not saying she’s the culprit, but she’s a solid suspect.” She’d glanced over at Steve. “And one without an alibi.”

“Except whoever was in that doughnut shop,” Clint’d offered. She’d flicked her eyes in his direction, eyebrows raised, and he’d picked at the rim of his coffee cup. “You found her there, right? I’m sure somebody knows when she showed up.”

“Three in the morning,” the detective’d replied evenly. “She ordered a coffee and an apple fritter and sat in the corner reading.”

“And the kids in Carriage Hill saw their mystery girl around eleven,” Howlett’d filled in. “Plenty of time for her to run around town after keying their cars.”

“Or to not,” Clint’d challenged, and Howlett’d lifted one shoulder in response. “She’s in one hell of a mess, and if we can avoid charging her for something she maybe didn’t do, then—”

“Part of why we charge people is so we _can_ find out if they did it,” Steve’d pointed out just then, and Clint’d glanced over to find the other man watching him carefully. “No case starts off as a slam-dunk, but if multiple detectives I know and trust tell me to go forward—” 

Clint’d raised his hands. “I get it,” he’d cut in. “If we’ve got enough for probable cause, that’s good enough for me. Just playing devil’s advocate in the meantime.”

“And I don’t know if we’re there.” Steve and Clint had both glanced across the table to watch Howlett shrug again, shifting his elbows to the tabletop. “We’ve got the girl running around unsupervised and a bunch of guys who hate her saying she screwed with their cars. You think you can sneak that past Smithe?” He’d shaken his head. “It deserves a couple more days of investigation.”

Steve’d frowned. “I don’t know if it’s in anyone’s best interests to wait.”

Howlett’d snorted. “Who’s it gonna hurt? I already got the parents calling me because they want to send the cars to the body shop. Bishop’s locked up so she won’t run for it. And maybe if we wait, the real vandal will show up.”

“As opposed to a fake vandal?” Steve’d asked.

“As opposed to a mystery girl who might or might not be Kate Bishop,” Howlett’d returned, and stretched all the way back in the chair.

He’s stretched out the same way, his legs spread and head resting against the back of the armchair, as Clint hands him a mug of hot coffee. He nods his thanks and ignores the steam to try a sip. His lips curl into a slow-burn smile. “Now _that_ is coffee.”

“There’s a reason we bought Bucky a huge Starbucks gift card for his birthday,” Clint retorts, and the detective snorts a laugh. He drops into his own chair, aware a second too late that Howlett’s studying him over the rim of his mug. Clint forces a tiny smile. “You wanted to talk about Kate Bishop?”

“Yeah,” he replies. His eyes slide briefly to the pile of reports in the middle of Clint’s desk. “You still reviewing her stuff?”

Clint frowns. “That a problem?”

“Not for me, it’s not,” Howlett replies. He sits up just far enough to rest his mug on the edge of Clint’s desk, his elbows resting on his thighs. He’s in slacks and a gray t-shirt that hugs his shoulders, imposing and broad in Clint’s small office, and Clint watches his jaw flex. He’s quiet for almost too long before he finally asks, “How much do you know about her?”

“About Kate Bishop?” The detective nods, and Clint shrugs. “Not a ton,” he answers. The other man raises his eyebrows. “More than’s maybe in the file,” Clint continues slowly, “but not a whole lot more.”

“You talk to Jones about her?” 

“You _know_ Jones?” Howlett narrows his eyes as an answer, and Clint quickly raises a hand. “Yeah,” he admits, “but she’s ethically bound to only tell me the vague version of the greatest hits. I’m guessing you know her from something?”

“Not her, but I know those five boys she kicked the shit out of,” he replies, and picks up his coffee.

Clint clings desperately to the most neutral face he can make, but he knows from the way Howlett watches him that he fails miserably. He picks up his own coffee and drinks down a few gulps without tasting it. His heart feels a couple sizes too big, swollen and throbbing hard behind his ribcage; the lump in his throat nearly chokes him, and his stomach churns around his breakfast and now lunch of black coffee. He holds onto his mug even after he sets it down, his fingers gripping the ceramic too tight, and forces himself to meet Howlett’s eyes.

Howlett stares right back until Clint finally says, “You think the fight wasn’t her first run-in with those guys.”

“Got it in one,” Howlett replies. He rests his mug on the arm of the chair and leans back again, one leg crossed over the other. “I don’t know the whole story,” he says after a couple more seconds. “Hell, I’m not sure there _is_ a whole story. Maybe my gut’s leading me the wrong way. But you gotta understand, kids like these—the guys _and_ Bishop both—come with a whole different world of baggage than the ones people like us grew up with. Parents with money to burn and lawyers on retainer. It’s a whole different universe from getting smacked in the back of the head for stealing a beer when nobody’s looking.”

Clint almost cracks a smile. “You know that from experience?”

“You don’t?” Howlett retorts, and Clint snorts a laugh as he picks up his coffee again. The detective just shakes his head. “I hate working cases with the rich ones because of it,” he admits. “Everybody lies and jerks you around, but they do it with suits who threaten to sue you like it’s going out of style.” 

“Like Killgrave?” Clint ventures.

“Killgrave was a snake, but credit where it’s due, he always acted the part. I can handle those. But what I can’t stand are the snakes in sheep’s clothing.”

Clint rolls his eyes at that, amused for probably the first time all day, and Howlett flashes him a tiny grin as he drinks his coffee. Clint tries to settle back in his chair, but his whole body feels too tight, like he’s bracing for impact. Howlett seems to sense that, because after Clint’s shifted around for the second time, he stops drinking and sets his mug on his knee.

“Late November, I’m out on the early morning shift, and I grab a call,” he explains, his thumb running along the rim of the mug. “Details are vague, but what I get from dispatch is that some kids threw a party and somebody got hurt. It’s six, seven in the morning, way past when any party’d still be going. So dispatch sends me out to— What’s that fancy neighborhood out on the Union County border? By that upscale mall where everything’s brick?”

“Sanctuary Park? Gated community with huge yards?”

“Right, that one,” he agrees. He pauses for another swallow of coffee. “They send me out there, in the freezing cold, and I figure that I’ll be one of the first ones on the scene. Turns out, I was back-up, there to help crowd control.” He shakes his head. “Because by the time I pull up, there’s another squad car there, plus probably a dozen other cars in the driveway and on the street. I get out, and I’m greeted by one cop and three attorneys. They’d circled the wagons the second the first squad car pulled up.”

Clint purses his lips, his fingers still clenched around his coffee mug. He watches as Howlett shifts in his chair, uncrossing and then recrossing his solid legs. It’s a couple seconds later before Clint asks, “You get a handle on what happened?” His voice’s tight enough that the detective cocks his head a couple inches, and he forces a smile. “Sorry, am I screwing with your dramatic reveal or something?”

“No, but you’re pushy,” Howlett retorts, and tosses him a shitty little grin. Clint snorts and sips his coffee. “The whole thing never really came together, if I’m honest,” Howlett continues. “The way Cassidy—one of the guys who responded before me—told it, this group of kids’d been house-jumping for one of their birthdays. Roaming free around the neighborhood, I guess, playing pool one place and eating pizza at the next, or whatever rich kids do at their birthday parties. After long enough, everybody went home—but not before someone called in and said there were problems at the party.” He shrugged. “But it must’ve been when everybody was on their way out, because by the time Cassidy and Guthrie showed, the only people left at the address were the birthday boy and his buddies.”

“Kate’s victims,” Clint says. His stomach twists when Howlett nods. “They say who called? ‘Cause if it happened at a party for one of them, you’d think they’d know who was screwing around and calling—”

“You’d think so, yeah,” Howlett interrupts, the corner of his mouth kicking up into a humorless grin, “but not according to these boys. I only talked to Miller—nice kid, squirrelly as hell—and he said that he thought somebody was just ‘having fun with them.’” He snorts and rolls his eyes. “He smelled like a cheap bar before they banned indoor smoking. I asked him about it, but one of the lawyers kept eyeballing me. We got reminded about fifteen times that we can’t search without permission, probable cause, or a warrant. You’d think they just all walked out of Fourth Amendment class.”

Clint manages half a grin. “Can’t let you shitty cops forget the rules, now can we?”

“We must have shitty memories, too, the amount they repeated it.” Clint chuckles, and Howlett finishes off his coffee. He puts the mug down on the edge of the desk, hard, before he looks up at Clint, his face as cool and serious as Clint’s ever seen it. “I can’t tell you what happened,” he says steadily, “but the boys all had the same story: nobody got hurt, and the caller was just screwing with them. All good, clean birthday fun.”

“Good, clean fun that required three cops and everybody’s lawyer?” Clint asks. His voice sounds sticky and uncertain, even in his own ears. 

Howlett rolls his lips together. “And that’s the thing,” he replies. He rests his elbows on his thighs, his fingers tangling, and sits quietly for a couple seconds. Clint swears he hears his own heartbeat pounding in his ears. “After the fact, I ask Cassidy why they called in an extra detective for some teenage prank. Because to me, it looked like the crap we see all the time: rich kids throw a booze- and drug-soaked party, parents freak out and make sure we can’t stick our noses in anywhere. And Cassidy, who’s this loud Irish fuck, goes quiet on me for a good long minute.”

He raises his eyes to catch Clint’s again, and they’re dark and steady. Clint grips his mug hard enough that his arm muscles jump.

“And he tells me that, when he got called out, he wasn’t just told that ‘somebody got hurt,’” Howlett continues, his voice low and dark. “He was told that the caller was a girl and that she got hysterical. Said that the caller told dispatch there was booze going around and she got attacked at that party—and that the call got cut off before she finished explaining what happened.”

Clint pulls in a breath that’s a little sharper than necessary and holds onto it for a second too long. “A girl called,” he repeats slowly, every word its own sentence.

Howlett’s jaw works before he finally nods. “Yeah,” he replies, “and I think it might’ve been your Kate Bishop.”

 

==

 

When Clint wakes up Monday morning—later than usual, thanks to forty-five minutes of smashing the snooze alarm—he smells coffee drifting down the hallway from the kitchen. He rubs his eyes for a second, drags himself out of bed, and almost trips over the suitcase that’s sitting in the hallway right outside the bedroom door. He blinks at it a couple times, like it appeared there all on its own, and then forgets about his bone-deep exhaustion (and his morning bladder) to head straight down the hall.

There at the kitchen table, in a soft t-shirt and jeans and with his reading glasses perched on his nose, is Phil, newspaper open in front of him like always. Clint stops in the doorway for a second, drowning in the actual fact of him: the line of his shoulders, the tiny wave in the back of his hair that means he needs it cut, the way he nudges his glasses up without even thinking about it. Before Clint even realizes, he’s padding across the tile and sliding his arms around Phil’s neck from behind; his face presses into his soft hair as Phil chuckles at him.

“You didn’t wake me up,” he complains, and Phil releases the newspaper to run fingers along the length of Clint’s bare arms. He smells like wind and his deodorant, and Clint breathes him in. “I was already gonna be late, and now it’s gonna be worse.”

“You kept grumbling ‘aww, alarm clock’ and slapping your phone,” Phil replies. He tilts his head back, and Clint pulls away enough that he can meet his eyes. “Really, you should thank me.”

“For not waking me up when you got home?” Clint asks, frowning.

“For texting Fury and warning him that you’re going to be _very_ late this morning,” he replies, and Clint’s whole body warms when Phil laughs into a lazy morning kiss.

 

==

 

It’s late that afternoon, the summer sun glinting off all the cars in the parking lot and almost blinding Clint through the window, when Thor knocks on Clint’s door. “There is a young lady in the conference room by Judge Smithe’s courtroom I believe you need to meet,” he says, and walks away.

Clint frowns, watching as the guy disappears past Darcy’s cubicle and down the hallway, and pinches the bridge of his nose. Despite the excitement of Phil finally showing back up home—excitement that maybe kept them out of the office until after ten—Clint’s spent the whole day burrowed under a mountain of _work_. He’s prepped for three different evidentiary hearings, reviewed documents for the argued sentencing hearing Darcy’s handling on Tuesday morning, and spent his lunch editing the motion to suppress response that Darcy wrote. He handled two quick-and-dirty probation revocation hearings right after lunch—egg salad stuck to his tie, because the universe apparently hates him that much—and now he’s neck-deep in his own rushed, disorganized writing, the response to a messy motion to dismiss hand-written by the defendant. His eyes hurt from squinting at the tiny handwriting, and when he checks his computer monitor, he’s disappointed to find he’s only written maybe five hundred words of the thing.

He drags his fingers through his hair, sighs to himself, and decides to follow Thor. At least the pleasant burn in his thighs reminds him that, yeah, Phil’s finally _home_.

The office sparkles and shines with its usual Monday energy, file clerks and trial assistants running everywhere, and Clint hugs the wall to avoid being slammed into or run over. Pepper glances up from her argument about comma placement with Tony to flash him a quick smile, and Clint immediately reciprocates; Jane switches deftly back and forth between two different incoming phone calls, scheduling and rescheduling hearings for Bruce and Natasha. The whole place is chaos, but it’s the kind of chaos that feels like home, and Clint basks in it.

Phil’s in Maria’s office when he passes, their heads bent together as they review some document or another, and Clint tries not to linger in the doorway and watch before he wanders out toward their office’s waiting room.

Thor’s standing there, tall and broad in his slacks, dress shirt, and fitted gray waistcoat, and he crosses his arms the second he spots Clint. “I worried you hadn’t followed.”

“And miss out on whatever journey into mystery you cobbled together?” Clint retorts. Thor grins at him, wide and easy. “You want to tell me what this is about, or are you just throwing me into the lion’s den?”

“Why not both?” Thor returns. Clint rolls his eyes, and the other man ushers him out into the hallway and toward the elevators. They’re safely inside and alone when he explains, “This morning, I appeared before Judge Smithe for a sentencing matter. The juvenile in question was found vandalizing a dumpster outside a church a few months ago. She’s been in and out of both this and the Union County court, but she never seems to commit any offenses that warrant serious punishment. Never have I met a sixteen-year-old more willing to do community service and write genuine apology letters.”

He shakes his head. Clint quirks an eyebrow. “And I want to meet this girl why?” 

The elevator doors open on the second floor, and Thor smiles. “Because at the end of the hearing, she inquired whether I was the prosecutor handling Miss Bishop’s case.” Clint almost trips out of the elevator, and Thor tosses an amused glance over his shoulder. “And when I told her that I was not, she informed me she would not leave the courthouse until I introduced her.”

Clint’s mouth opens, but no sound falls out. He listens to Thor chuckle as he leads the way down the hall. They’ve passed probably a dozen attorneys, defendants, and witnesses before his brain catches up enough that he can blurt, “You’re screwing with me, right?”

“I am afraid not, friend,” Thor replies, and opens the door to the offices behind Judge Smithe’s courtrooms.

One of the juvenile clerks—the female one, not that Clint’s ever figured out her name—nearly leaps out from behind their office counter. She’s pale, honey-haired, and talks at about three hundred miles an hour. “Mister Odinson, I hope you don’t mind terribly—or that you’ll forgive me if you _do_ mind terribly, because it is the sort of thing you might mind—but I gave the girl in the conference room a soda. Mostly because she asked to go get a soda herself, but she _is_ a juvenile in our courts and you _did_ ask that Fitz and I keep an eye on her, and, well, I certainly don’t want to disappoint.” She stops abruptly, her lips pursing tightly together, and flicks her eyes in Clint’s direction. Clint forces a small smile, and color floods her cheeks. “I didn’t realize you were bringing a, uhm, friend.”

Thor grins. “Miss Simmons, this is Clint Barton, another of the assistant district attorneys in my office. Clint, this is—”

“You’re prosecuting the Kate Bishop case,” Simmons announces. Thor stops talking to smile, and the pink in her cheeks climbs down her neck. “Not, of course, that we ordinarily pay attention to that sort of thing in this office—you know, who is prosecuting what and whether their pictures on the website really do them justice—”

“You checked my picture?” Clint asks. 

She pauses, lips parted and eyes wide, and then forces a tight smile. Her fingers tangle in one of her curls, twirling her hair nervously. “What I mean,” she says after another second, “is that it is very nice to meet you, Mister Barton.”

“Uh, likewise,” Clint replies. When he and Thor head down the hallway, he swears he can feel her painfully forced grin burning a hole in the back of his neck. “Is she always like that?” he asks.

Thor almost smiles. “I’m afraid that is mild.”

They follow the hallway back to the juvenile court conference room, a yellow-painted eyesore with giant decals of trees and flowers stuck to the far wall. A younger guy in skinny corduroys and a plaid shirt—the other juvenile clerk, Clint recognizes after a second—jumps out of his chair the second the door opens. The wide-eyed terror on his face only slides away when he recognizes Thor, his shoulders instantly softening. “Mister Odinson,” he says.

“Mister Fitz,” Thor greets.

In the far corner of the conference room, someone snorts. “Wimp,” a female voice says, and Clint glances in that direction.

He’s not sure what he expected from Thor’s description, exactly—a broodier version of Cassie Lang, maybe, or a sharp-eyed Kate Bishop doppelganger—but the second the girl raises her chin enough to meet his eyes, he knows that she’s anything but. Dark, curly hair hangs down past her shoulders, highlighting her brown eyes and tanned skin and only half-hidden by the hood of a red sweatshirt. She wears a jean jacket over the sweatshirt plus a t-shirt Clint swears she stole from Steve’s closet—blue with a giant white star on the chest. Her long legs stretch onto the chair next to her, her half-untied high-top sneakers resting on the seat, and Clint realizes a second too late that her pants are actually tiny black shorts.

The girl snaps her gum at him. “Kate told me you creep on teenage girls,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest.

Clint chokes on air, a little, and quickly shakes his head. “Kate probably said I hang out with teenage girls—which is a lie, by the way.”

“Says the guy who knows her good enough to guess what she really said.”

“Professional hazard,” Clint retorts, and the girl flashes him a toothy, almost predatory smile.

At his shoulder, Thor clears his throat, and Clint twists around to discover that the male clerk’s disappeared, leaving the three of them alone in the conference room. The door’s closed, and in the last minute or two, Thor’s somehow acquired a legal pad. He smiles, but there’s something serious lurking in his face. “Clint Barton, meet Miss America Chavez,” he says, and gestures toward the girl.

The girl—America—rolls her eyes. “You say it like that, I sound like a beauty queen,” she points out.

“Doesn’t every little girl want to be a beauty queen?” Thor asks as he sits at the table.

“You’ve met me, Odinson. You think looking like a princess is real high on my to-do list?” Thor snorts at that, shaking his head, and America watches him for a couple seconds too long before she flicks her gaze back up at Clint. He stands there as she studies him, hands in his pockets. She smirks. “Kate’s right. You don’t look a whole lot like a lawyer.”

“Thanks?” Clint replies. She snorts a tiny laugh and reaches for her soda. He hesitates for a couple seconds and then, like Thor, sits down. “You wanted to meet the attorney handling Kate’s case, right?” America nods. “Well, here I am, for—whatever you need, I guess.”

“See, it’s not what _I_ need,” she returns. She swings her legs off the chair and swivels around so she can rest her arms all the way on the table. One of her bright red fingernails picks at the soda tab. “Cassie called me yesterday. Told me Kate’s locked in detention because she ran off Friday night and whatever.”

Clint glances toward Thor. “My brother has filed no civil cases about Miss Bishop’s—acts of aggression,” he says. “The risk of a conflict of interest seems slight at this point.”

Clint rolls his lips together for a second, the silence punctuated by the constant metallic _ping_ of America thumbing at the tab on her can. Finally, he nods and shifts back toward the girl. “Since you already seem to know,” he tells her slowly, “Kate is in detention until at least the end of the day today because she ran away.”

“And because she keyed some cars, too, right?” America adds.

Clint shifts in his seat, trying hard to stand on the little bolt of surprise that runs up his spine. America’s not really looking at him, but the tension in her shoulders is enough to let him know that he’s got exactly one chance at whatever she thinks is the right answer. He folds his hands on the tabletop. “Because she ran away,” he repeats. When she flicks her eyes up toward him, he shrugs. “I can’t tell you anything else about what she did or didn’t do, but she’s in detention because she ran off.”

“But you think she keyed some cars.”

“I can’t say whether I think that or not.”

Her chin raises a half-inch. “And if I tell you that she didn’t key those cars, does that change anything?”

Clint loses the battle to surprise _hard_ , because before he really realizes what the hell he’s doing, he’s flattened both his hands to the tabletop and blurted, “Excuse me?” Next to him, Thor stills, frozen as a statue and twice as hard. Clint knows without looking that the guy’s staring, big-eyed, at America. Clint’s doing the exact same thing.

America leans back in her chair and crosses her arms over her chest. Some of her hair falls back behind her shoulders, showing off big hoop earrings. They glint when she jerks her chin at them. “I said,” she repeats, drawing out the words like she thinks they’re both stupid, “what if I tell you that Kate Bishop didn’t key anybody’s car?”

“America,” Thor warns. His voice rumbles in his chest like thunder, and Clint glances over his shoulder to find out that his jaw’s set in a tight line. “This is no game. If you have information about a crime, you need to come forward, not—”

“That’s what I’m _doing_ ,” America interrupts, tossing up her hands. She sits forward, her hood falling off the top of her head, and looks between Clint and Thor. “Look, when I did what I did, I didn’t think Kate’d get the blame for it. I knew she’d been running around at night, but I figured she’d wise up and go home like she did every night before then. She didn’t, and now that’s on me. But I’m not letting her take the blame.”

Clint frowns. “For the vandalism?” he asks carefully.

America rolls her eyes. “No,” she returns, “for giving those _pendejos_ what they deserved.” 

Next to Clint, Thor snorts and starts to protest—at least, until Clint swivels his chair around and shoots him a quick, tight look. They stare each other down, Thor’s brow wrinkling in confusion until Clint shakes his head a little. He remembers, vaguely, meetings like these—ugly conference rooms, serious attorneys, Trick red-faced with yelling—and how easy it’d been to shut himself down and end the conversation.

At the end of the table, America starts playing with the soda tab again. When Clint raises his eyebrows, Thor nods and looks away.

“I want to believe you,” Clint says, surprised at the honesty that seeps into his own tone, and America stops thumbing at the tab to stare at him. He shrugs. “I’m pretty good at reading people,” he explains, “and I don’t think you’re the type to make shit up when it’s gonna land you in the hot water. But I also think you know how this works, and how specific we need you to be if you’re in a hurry to do the right thing.”

America purses her lips, her eyes dropping to the soda can. She brushes hair out of her face before she shakes her head. “Kate and Cassie and me, we’re all in this group,” she says after a couple seconds, her voice quieter than before. “We’d never hang out together in real life—hell, we wouldn’t talk to each other in real life—but group’s different. And Kate, she kind of drifts between the two of us. Tells me some things, Cassie others. Almost like there’re two versions of her.”

She steals a quick glance up at Clint, and he nods at her. She nods back, her chin bobbing, and then looks back down at the can. “She never told me what happened,” she continues, “but she said these asshole guys were messing with her. Sending her shitty text messages, spreading rumors—the real juvenile bullshit I thought they saved for shitty ABC Family shows, ‘cause no way in hell you’d pull that in my neighborhood without someone pounding you into the pavement.” Clint snorts a little laugh, and she snaps her head up. “I’m not screwing around,” she warns him.

He raises his hands. “I know you’re not,” he promises, and she glares at the grin that keeps nudging his lips. “I just know that kind of neighborhood pretty well.”

“The mean streets of Carriage Hill, right?” 

“Try Colier Woods Trailer Park,” he returns, and watches as America’s eyebrows jump almost into her hairline. She recovers quickly, her eyes narrowing, and he lowers his hands to the tabletop. “I’m just saying, I know what it’s like.”

“Maybe,” she replies. She curls her hands around the soda can again, wetting her lips slowly. “She figured they’d cut it out by the time school ended, since they graduated, but they got worse instead of better. Started sending her picture texts, and I am _not_ explaining what kind if you can’t read between the lines.” Clint forces a tiny grin even as his gut clenches. “I found that Perkins kid on Facebook, and since the dumbass had his address on there, I decided to go take care of business.” She shrugs. “Found out his buddies were there and killed three birds all in one go.”

There’s a tiny note of defiance in the back of her voice, almost like she’s daring Clint to doubt her, and Clint swallows thickly. He’s still thinking about his next question—about the vandalism, maybe, or about the texts those boys kept sending Kate—when Thor asks, “Do you understand how serious this is?” Clint glances over to find him staring America down, his gaze flinty and unblinking. “If we believe your story—and, unlike Mister Barton, I am not sure I am convinced—we could charge you with these crimes. You could be found in violation of your probation and placed outside your home: in a shelter, in a group home, in—”

“You think I don’t know that?” America interrupts. She flicks her hair over her shoulder, scoffing. “I know how this ends. My moms go off on me again. I end up seeing probably two other therapists besides Miss J, and, if I’m lucky, I do community service until I’m twenty-one to make up for all my fuck-ups.” She rolls her eyes, but when her expression settles, her face is young and soft. “But the difference between me and Kate is that I’ve done all of that before,” she says finally. “I know how to deal with it. I’m used to the whole ‘spend a couple shock days in detention’ or whatever. She’s not, and I don’t want her to keep having to do it.”

Clint feels his brow tighten. “You think she can’t handle it?”

She glances over, meeting his eyes fearlessly. “I think she could, but I don’t think she should have to, either.”

Everything moves pretty fast after that—Thor slides America the legal pad, tells her to start writing out exactly what happened, and storms out the door to bellow for the clerks. Clint follows him out, hovering while the guy calls Detective Munroe and while Simmons calls America’s lawyer. By the time the detective shows up, Clint’s moved out of the clerks’ tiny shared office and into the waiting area just beyond it; he’s out in the main hallway, sitting on a bench, when Sif shows up and starts shouting about questioning her client without counsel or a guardian present. Clint leans his head back against the wall and watches the clock slowly tick by the minutes, his head swarming with a thousand thoughts he can’t exactly track. They circle around and around, spirals within spirals, and all of them orbit Kate Bishop: her and the boys she beat up; her or another girl calling the cops about a party in Sanctuary Park; her name painted across a bank of lockers, along with a slur. He’s drowning in his own head by the time Thor emerges into the hall.

He settles next to Clint, elbows on his thighs. He’s quiet for a long time before he says, “I will need to talk to Steve, but I believe America will be charged with the vandalism rather than Kate.”

Clint spares him one half-second sideways glance. “You believe her?”

“What choice do I have but to believe her?” Thor responds, and Clint snorts a little as he looks back at the clock. Next to him, Thor pulls in a breath. “I know I encouraged you to seek out the beginning of Kate Bishop’s case and everything surrounding it,” he says after a couple seconds, “but I worry about you.” Clint rolls his eyes, but when he glances over, Thor’s watching him evenly. “I became a juvenile prosecutor because I was once as uncontrolled as Kate Bishop, or America Chavez, or perhaps even a young Clint Barton.” The corner of his mouth kicks up, and Clint can’t help a tiny chuckle. “But I learned very quickly that finding too much of myself in these children leads me down paths I can’t travel. Because as much as we want to, we cannot help people who aren’t ready to be helped—or who are frightened of what that help might mean.”

Glancing down at his folded hands, Clint nods slightly. He’s picked a hangnail almost to the point of bleeding, and it hurts when he runs his thumb over it. “Every time I think I find the bottom of the rabbit hole, it just goes deeper,” he admits.

Thor chuckles. “Then perhaps it is time to stop digging,” he replies, and clasps Clint’s shoulder.

 

==

 

“This case is like that part in _Alice in Wonderland_ when Alice is following the white rabbit and trips down the hole under the tree, all Whomping Willow style,” Wade Wilson says Tuesday night as he licks a stray drip of ice cream off the heel of his hand. “Weird stuff keeps flying in every direction, and there’s nothing she can grab hold of, and then _bang_! Rock bottom.”

He punctuates the _bang_ by slapping the kitchen table, their bowls jumping and rattling. At the kitchen sink, Phil sighs. “The playdate ends early if you break our dishes,” he warns, but Clint catches the twinkle in the corner of his eye. “It’s part of that whole ‘no running in the house’ rule we set up last time you invited a friend over.”

“But _dad_ ,” Clint mock-whines, and Phil—laughter tugging at the corners of his mouth—stops rinsing the last of the dishes to send him a stern little look.

At least, until Wade shudders. “Great, now daddy kinks are literally ruined for me _forever_ ,” he complains, and both Clint and Phil dissolve into hard, loud laughter.

In Wade’s defense—not that Clint really thinks Wade needs or deserves one—it’d been Clint’s plan to invite the guy over to discuss Kate Bishop’s disaster of a case. They’d originally agreed to just meet at the office late Tuesday afternoon after Wade and Kate had a chance to sit down and talk, but then Darcy’d called in sick and Dot Barnes’s daycare’d lost power and asked all the parents to collect their kids for the day. The whole morning’d spiraled into a fucking master class in damage control, and by lunch, he’d retreated into a nice dream world of sweat pants, beer, and Phil’s homemade carbonara.

At about four-thirty in the afternoon, with a messy docket under his belt and one plea hearing left, Phil’d stepped up behind Clint in the break room. At the feel of a hand on his waist, Clint’d almost knocked over his coffee cup. “You need to go home,” Phil’d said close to his ear.

Clint’d snorted. “You think, boss?”

“I’m serious.” Clint’d only realized how badly he’d missed Phil’s sincere eyes once he’d glanced over his shoulder. “Natasha’s agreed to cover Bucky’s plea hearing. Call Wade, tell him you’ll meet with him later, and go home. I’ll be out of here by five.”

“Okay, who are you and what’ve you done with the workaholic I live with?” Clint’d retorted, but Phil’d just smiled as he walked away. 

Clint firmly denies pouncing on him the second he walked through the door, or leaving various parts of his suit strewn all over the foyer and hallway. After the last two months, he deserves the break.

He also, according to Wade, deserves exactly half a pint of Americone Dream, which is melting into a caramel-vanilla soup in the bottom of his bowl. “You could’ve picked any other night to come over,” he points out as he turns back to the laptop.

“Unlike some people in this room—not that I’m naming names, because that seems fundamentally unfair to the not-guilty party, and I am nothing if not fair and just, like blind lady justice—I have important plans tomorrow night _and_ Thursday night, and trivia on Friday.” He leans over to steal a chunk of waffle cone from Clint’s bowl, and Clint smacks him on the hand with his spoon. “Okay, you know what? I will name names, and the name I am naming is—”

“Do your important plans involve your significant other?” Phil asks. Wade startles like a deer on a hiking trail, but Phil just rests his hip against the counter. “Because I think everyone in this room has plans with their significant other tomorrow and Thursday night.”

Wade squints at him. “Is your plan sex?”

Phil’s slow-burn grin sparks white-hot in the pit of Clint’s belly. “I can neither confirm nor deny—”

“I officially hate your boyfriend with the passion of that one planet’s double-suns,” Wade declares, and covers his ears with his hands.

Clint laughs again, shaking his head, and Phil’s crow’s feet bunch as he walks over. He leans down to steal a kiss, murmuring something about catching up on case management stuff for Maria, but Clint misses the actual words because he’s too busy soaking up his _presence_. The last couple stressful weeks melt away the longer that he can leech Phil’s heat and smell his cologne; he chases Phil’s mouth when Phil pulls away, and Phil chuckles at him before he wanders off.

Across the table, Wade groans audibly. “I actually and in the truest sense of the word hate you both _so_ much right now.”

Clint grins. “Jealous?”

“Jealous? Uh, last I checked my boyfriend is, like, ten feet wide and could bench press me. No amount of _The Walking Dead_ fangirling can really trump that.” Clint rolls his eyes as Wade scrapes the bottom of his ice cream bowl clean. “Though, if you’re ever up for one of those car key bowl parties—”

“No.”

“We can invite other people—Bobby and his chunk of guy, Stark and Banner, maybe Assistant District Attorney Ass You Can Bounce a Quarter Off Of and his—”

“Can we _please_ talk about your client instead of Rogers’s ass?” Clint interrupts. Wade beams at him, eyes twinkling, and Clint sighs. “I swear, you have a one-track mind, and it all revolves around sex, Nate, and _Dance Moms_.”

“Mixed metaphor aside, _Dance Moms_ is awesome and your life partner agrees with me,” Wade retorts, but he pushes his bowl aside to make room for Kate Bishop’s criminal file. It’s a disorganized mess of documents not quite bound into the folder, and he straightens the stack before he opens it. “So,” he says after a couple seconds of rooting around in his pile of random papers, “Kate swears that the only thing she’s guilty of is spending the night in a doughnut shop and that we all need to back off and let her deal with her shit.” He pauses and glances up. “That last part’s a direct quote. Well, mostly-direct. She didn’t talk in the third person or anything, but she definitely said shit.”

He returns to his mess, and Clint sighs. When he pinches the bridge of his nose, he’s reminded of the nagging tension headache he’s felt building all day; he settles for rubbing a hand over his face instead. “I counted how many terms of her diversion she’s broken,” he tells Wade, “and it’s at least three. Four if we want to include her night as a runaway as another run-in with the law. Jones is worried about her, I think her step-mom’s actually worried about her, and—”

“I know,” Wade cuts him off. He runs fingers through his messy hair, and Clint watches as his shoulders soften and slump. “I spent two hours with her this morning. She polished off my last Cherry 7-Up and half a bag of Carol’s peanut butter cups—and if she asks, I know nothing about their disappearance,” he adds, and Clint rolls his eyes. “But, anyway, she just seemed—” He pauses, shrugging slightly. “That girl wears a whole lot of masks, let me put it that way.”

Clint nods vaguely. He glances back at the computer screen, focusing in on the diversion agreement so he’s not forced to meet Wade’s eyes. After a couple seconds, he asks, “What mask’d she wear today?”

“Say what?”

“To your meeting. What version of Kate did you get?”

“Is there an ultra-secretive one? Because if yes, then her.” Clint snorts at him, but Wade just flashes him a half-second smile before his face settles into something a lot more solemn. “Nate’s kid talks to me more about stuff when I ask and she can’t actually hear the questions. The more I pushed, the more she crawled into this weird hole until she just kept saying—in a dozen different ways, but here’s another almost-quote for you—that her step-mom’d ‘pissed her off enough that she needed a break for five minutes.’” He shakes his head. “She swears nothing happened with the guys she beat up, with her friends, with her boyfriend—”

“Wait, she has a _boyfriend_?” Clint blurts, jerking his head away from the computer. 

“Technically, no, he’s just a guy from group therapy she likes, but she thinks maybe he likes her back and if she primes the pump with it a little more, then maybe . . . ” He trails off and leans back in his chair. “I don’t think anything new or different happened, at least not on the outside,” he says after a long couple beats of silence, “but I think maybe something changed for her _inside_ , and now she’s in full porcupine mode.”

“Do you have any theories on what happened?” Clint asks.

Wade sighs. “No clue. And before you ask if that’s just me not understanding human nature or whatever, I actually talked to both Bobby _and_ Nate about her and they said mostly the same things.”

Clint looks back at the laptop for a couple seconds. He’s reread the damn diversion agreement a dozen times, trying to categorize all of Kate’s boneheaded decisions. She’s skipped out on therapy, she’s refused community service, she’s about as cooperative as a cactus, and now, she’s technically a runaway. 

Finally, though, he glances back at Wade. “As her defense attorney, how do you feel about the diversion?” Wade frowns until his eyes are squinty little slivers. “You know she’s on thin ice here, right? I shouldn’t even be talking to you about it, I should be writing a motion to pull her off diversion and bring back the charges.” Wade’s head bobs, and Clint catches his eyes. “But because I’m an idiot half the time, I trust you, and I want to know what you think.”

“Seriously? Like, in a genuine lawyer-like give-and-take kind of way?”

Clint snorts at him. “Yeah, Wade, like that.”

“Then in that case, I think revoking the diversion’ll send her into a super tailspin of doom and we have to stop that from happening.” He sits forward, his arms stretching along the empty plane of the table. After he spends a couple seconds staring Clint down, he shakes his head. “I think somewhere, deep, deep, _deep_ down in that messed-up head of hers that she keeps pretending isn’t all that messed up, Kate knows that she’s balancing on a high-wire of fucking up her whole entire life. I think that’s computed, loud and clear. But it’s like— Okay, you know how little kids touch the stove when you tell them it’s hot just to see? Like a weird, toddler trust fall kind of thing?”

“I guess?” 

“Right, okay, I think that’s what Kate’s doing right now. She’s pushing everybody on this case to the very edge of the cliff, where the dirt’s all crumbling and we’re all at risk of plunging to our really awful deaths, and she’s waiting to see what happens next. And if we lock her up and throw away the key, then we prove what she’s maybe believed all this time: that we all hate her and nobody cares.”

The way Wade phrases it—the way he punches the words _nobody cares_ and leaves them dangling there—feels like a sock to the stomach, and Clint forces himself to nod as he breathes around the shock. He thinks of Kate on his front stoop, messy-haired and lost, a wild girl caught in the rain. In those couple minutes, she’d needed a familiar face, somebody she’d trusted, and Clint—for reasons way beyond him—fit the bill. He knows without even thinking about it that her trust in everything—in him, in Jones, in her friends and family, even maybe in Wade—is starting to fray and break.

And he also knows that juvenile detention won’t fix any of that.

Finally, though, he just shakes his head. “What am I supposed to do besides asking the court to pull her off diversion?” he asks.

Wade shrugs. “I don’t know,” he admits, “but you definitely shouldn’t do that last thing.”

A good half-hour later, Clint wanders into the office to find Phil sitting on his old, crappy couch with Sandy curled up in the furthest corner from him. The whole house feels a little too dark and quiet after his conversation with Wade, and he swears more than once that his thoughts are bobbing around behind him like a shitty little storm cloud. Phil glances up from the iPad, smiling at him, and swings his legs off their little office coffee table so Clint can sit next to him on the couch.

His storm cloud theory’s apparently not totally off, because within about a minute, Phil’s ditched the tablet and his glasses to loop an arm around Clint’s shoulders. He tugs slightly, and Clint melts into the space beside him.

He’s missed this, too, he thinks as his eyes drift shut. He’s missed tactile comfort, sure hands on his skin and familiar breath against his ear. He’s missed how Phil grounds him without even trying to.

They sit there a long time, Clint with his cheek against Phil’s shoulder and Phil’s fingers drifting up and down the length of his arm, before Phil says, “You’re worried about her.”

Clint snorts a little. “Yeah,” he replies quietly. “I’m really worried.”

“Okay,” Phil responds gently, and kisses him near his hairline before they fall quiet again. 

 

==

 

“And as for the State’s reliance on _Bartleby_ , that is just patently ridiculous,” Fandral says, emphasizing his point with a flappy hand flourish. Clint leans back in his seat and tries not to roll his eyes.

Judge English’s courtroom is quiet and empty aside from Fandral and his scruffy client, and Clint’s bored enough that he’s tempted to count ceiling titles. On the bench, the judge nods along, but she’s heard the argument before; Fandral’s floated the damn thing in six different cases now, trying to find the right facts to strike down the DUI sentencing statute. He’s never gonna win—last week, Stark provided Clint yet another stack of cases from other states that prove Fandral’s full of hot air—but man, the guy is bound and determined to try.

In the front row of the gallery, the security officer’s head starts to droop. He jerks in his seat, rubs his face, and forces himself to stand.

Yeah, it’s one of _those_ mornings.

Clint flips to a blank page of his legal pad and starts scribbling down a to-do list, half-listening to the same bullshit about a semi-colon he’s suffered through before. He’s got paperwork to sign, a motion response to finish up, a meeting with a state trooper, and a phone interview with the victim of a nasty DUI accident—and that’s all before lunch. After lunch, he and Darcy need to run through all the cases for tomorrow’s docket, he needs to start planning out witnesses for a misdemeanor bench trial he’s covering for Bucky, he swore to Stark he’d quick review some weird traffic appeal that’s been pending since before he even started at the office, he—

The door at the back of the courtroom squeaks open suddenly, pulling Clint right out of his own head. Fandral twists at the podium, tosses a quick glance over his shoulder, and leaps right back into his speech. He’s wrapping up—he always saves the big constitutional fireworks for the end of his motions hearings. Clint abandons his list and, almost like an afterthought, turns to look into the courtroom.

His stomach immediately turns to lead.

Standing against the back wall, Ken Blake offers Clint a thin, humorless smile.

It distorts his face, pushing up his cheeks wrong until he looks like a shitty comic book villain, and Clint feels his jaw go a little slack. In a dark suit and tie, Blake looks like every other lawyer in the building—professional and impersonal, just like most of them like it. Clint swallows harder than he means to, nodding slightly, and Blake nods back.

They’re still watching each other when Fandral says, “I thank you, your honor,” and steps away from the podium. And even when Clint steps up for his arguments, his legal pad in his grip, he feels Blake’s eyes burning a hole in his back.

By the time he finishes—including a line about how _Bartleby_ will probably be good law until the end of time, a dig that makes Fandral huff in his seat—Blake’s disappeared out the door like a ghost. Clint stands in the well of the courtroom for a couple seconds too long, staring at the blank spot on the back wall, until Fandral lightly touches his arm. He jumps a little, and Fandral raises his eyebrows. “I did reserve time for rebuttal,” he says.

“Yeah, I— Sorry,” Clint mutters.

He spends Fandral’s three minutes of rebuttal wondering if he maybe hallucinated the whole thing.

Once the judge denies the motion and ends the hearing, he treks up the back stairwell, trying to remember whether Phil mentioned anything about Blake coming to town. Last night, Clint and Phil’d grabbed dinner out before Clint headed to drinks with Natasha and Bruce, and he’d shown up back home to Phil emptying out one of his two Denver suitcases. “Only getting halfway comfortable?” he’d joked as he’d flopped on the bed.

Phil’d rolled his eyes. “I’d rather leave a few things packed than have you mock my iron on Sunday night.”

“Because I’m not gonna mock your iron when you finally wash the last of your shirts,” Clint’d countered. Phil’d thrown a balled-up sock at him, he’d thrown it back, and long story short, they’d ended up laughing and kissing on their rumpled bedsheets. 

It’d been the kind of night Clint’d missed over the last two months, and he’d spent the rest of the night feeling like _he_ was the guy who’d just come home.

Back upstairs, he stops in the break room for a cup of coffee, drops off the file from the hearing with Fandral on Darcy’s desk, and heads into his office to start in on his damn to-do list. He dives head-first into his motion response, Westlaw printouts spread all over his desk and a pen shoved behind his ear as he rereads what he’d typed up the day before.

He only realizes that somebody’s stepped into his office after he notices movement out of the corner of his eye, and he sort of waves a hand in what he assumes is Darcy’s general direction. “I couldn’t figure out which pile was the ‘Clint needs to sign these’ pile,” he tells her, “so I left them alone. Especially after your attitude about the broken—”

“I’ll be sure to pass that on,” a man’s voice replies, and Clint twists in his chair just as Ken Blake starts admiring his diplomas and law license. They’re all hung and matted, a stupid graduation present Clint’d bought for himself and shoved on a credit card that hadn’t needed the five hundred dollar framing charge on it. The guy smiles a little at the stupid _Dean’s Honors_ sticker on Clint’s law degree, his face reflected in the glass. 

Clint rolls his lips together. “Nice to see you again, Blake,” he says carefully. Every word sticks in the back of his throat.

Blake snorts. “Your friend Tony Stark already told me how _un_ pleasant it is to see me again. You don’t need to play along.” He nudges the corner of one of the frames, straightening it before he turns around. “I needed to talk to Coulson. I didn’t think he’d mind if I did it in person instead of over the phone.”

“He probably doesn’t.” 

Blake nods, more to himself than anything else, and his steady eyes sweep slowly across the office. Unlike most people, Clint’s not covered his desk in little knickknacks and photographs; other than his diplomas and the pillows on the ledge, it’s pretty barren. Blake’s eyes twitch a little wider at the window ledge, and Clint forces a smile. 

“So,” he says, breaking too-loud into the awkward silence, “the U.S. Attorney’s office is pretty free with their airfare points or something? You fly enough, I’d think—”

“I have to hand it to you: you’re actually talented,” Blake interrupts, and the words all dry up on Clint’s tongue. He tucks his hands in the pockets of his slacks, that humorless smile crawling back across his face. “Of course, I’ve never known Coulson to pick someone based on looks alone, but your argument today was solid. You could do a lot better than a district attorney’s office in a town nobody’s ever heard of.”

Clint wets his lips. “Like where, exactly?”

“In Denver,” Blake replies. He shrugs, his expensive suit whispering gently against his sides. “Probably not my office—you’re talented, but you’re green, and god knows we chew up and spit out new attorneys over there—but the district attorney’s office up there’d take you in a heartbeat. Challenging, fast-paced, a lot more work than just traffic tickets and drunken soccer moms.” His nose wrinkles in distaste, and Clint feels his shoulders tense. “Of course, they’d need to have a position open. But there are plenty of state agencies who could use an attorney with a strong courtroom presence, too. I think the attorney general might even be hiring, but I’d need to—”

“Uh, okay, I think I’m missing something,” Clint cuts in, and Blake’s brow furrows in confusion. Something poisonous starts to unfurl in Clint’s gut, a slow creep of nausea that leaves him swallowing too hard. “Not that I don’t appreciate career advice, but I’m not looking for a job.”

“You’re not,” Blake repeats.

“No. Why would I be looking for another job?”

The other guy raises his dark eyebrows, staring at Clint for a couple beats too long before he finally shakes off the surprise. “I’m sorry, I just assumed—” he starts, then shakes his head. “Coulson made it sound like you two were serious, so I figured you’d come with him.”

Clint feels his spine jerk ramrod straight, his chair moving with him. The loose fists in his lap clench again. “Come with him where?” he asks. His voice sounds miles away, like an echo that barely makes it back to his small office.

“To Denver,” Blake says again. “When Coulson takes the job in the U.S. Attorney’s office.”


	14. Secret Sharers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, Clint is good at his job and bad at almost everything else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for frank discussion of sexual assault. Also, warning for Clint’s unsympathetic behavior at one point, though the logic behind it is explained in the end notes and the party at whom the unsympathetic behavior is directed is not upset by the behavior, in the end. 
> 
> The song Cody references is [“She’s So Mean,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8WLa6umgdw&feature=kp) a song that I think exemplifies how Kate is perhaps viewed by other teenage boys (even though we know she's not entirely like that).
> 
> Thanks as always to my absolutely amazing betas, Jen and saranoh, who notice both typos and intentional parallels.

Clint leaves.

He grabs his keys and his cell phone off his desk and walks out of his office, abandoning Ken Blake behind him. He bounds down the back stairwell in twos and threes, crosses the parking lot without ever looking over his shoulder, and once he’s in his car, he drives. He zigzags through midday traffic until he finds an on-ramp, and he accelerates onto the highway until his engine growls loud and hard enough that he feels it in his teeth. He passes semi-trucks and minivans, sedans and other hatchbacks, but he just keeps driving.

He drives aimlessly and unthinking, following signs he recognizes and, later, signs he’s never seen before, looping into Union County and then back around toward home. He passes by a farm with cows, under a half-finished bridge and the cranes supporting it, and around a pack of summer motorcyclists. He stares down billboards that advertise hotels and fast food joints, that warn him not to smoke and to wear his seat belt, and he only stops trying to read them when he realizes how blurry his vision’s gone.

He swipes at his eyes and accelerates past a rest stop. He changes lanes, finds an exit ramp, and recognizes immediately where he’s ended up.

The trailer park rattles in the heat of the summer, every window air conditioning unit cranked up past its maximum and vibrating against shitty tin siding, and Clint kills the car engine to just listen to the din. Trick’s old trailer, a piece of shit with chipped paint and torn-up awnings, sits all the way at the end of the lane, way beyond the visitor parking. A skinny dog spooks when Clint steps out onto the gravel, darting under a sagging porch and cowering; somewhere, music floats out of an open window, ghostly lyrics that only _just_ reach Clint’s ears.

It’s Adele.

He fucking hates Adele.

The air conditioning unit at Trick’s place is about three sizes too big for the living room window, propped up with some jerry-rigged wooden skeleton Barney built a good fifteen years ago, and it threatens to shake right off its stand and onto the cracked dirt Barney calls a front yard. Clint runs his fingers along its damp underside until he finds the trailer’s spare key. The porch creaks under his weight, rotten boards only barely holding him as he unlocks the door.

The smell of musty cigarette smoke and stale pot rushes up to greet him, and he breathes it in.

For just a second, standing there on the threshold of his brother’s place, it feels like home.

Dust floats in the sunlight that streams through the moth-eaten, age-yellowed drapes, and more rises up when Clint lets the squeaky old screen door slam behind him. Most of the furniture’s the same shit he remembers from right after Trick died—a beaten-up old sofa with rough upholstery, a gouged and battered coffee table older than Clint, lamps with ripped, permanently crooked shades—but it’s mostly clean and clear of clutter. He snorts at the Swiffer that’s shoved in the far corner and at the dishes drying in the drainer next to the sink. He pokes one of them, finds out it’s actual glass, and stares at it a long time.

There’s food in the fridge—a couple eggs, some leftover pizza, some cold cuts and cheese—but Clint just grabs a beer. He leans against the kitchen counter as he drinks it, watching the dust settle in the bright ribbons of sun and listening to the last couple strains of that fucking Adele song.

He’s leaning his head back against the upper set of cabinets, his eyes halfway closed and the beer cold on his tongue, when he hears footsteps thumping up the rickety steps. When he glances over, Barney’s standing in the doorway, shadowed by the mostly-intact awning hanging over the porch. He’s in a t-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts, his plastic grocery sack in each hand. 

He stares at Clint, and Clint glances down at the bottle in his hand. The screen door slams before Barney finally snorts at him. “Thanks for running up my electricity bill, asshole,” he snipes, and Clint laughs.

It’s just this one bark of laughter, sharp and bitter all at once, and he shakes his head at the sound of it. The problem is, though, the one bark turns into two, then four, and suddenly he’s laughing so fucking hard that he needs to put the bottle down. The laughter runs through him, full-body shudders he can’t control; he grips the countertop, but the sound just keeps rushing out of him like a freight train. Before he knows it, there’s wet on his face and his fingernails are scrabbling at the scratched-up laminate counter, and he can’t fucking stop.

“Shit,” he hears from the front door, and suddenly Barney’s there, grabbing his arm with both his hands and tugging him away from the counter. Clint tries to push him away, struggling for purchase, but his body feels like it belongs to somebody else altogether. He thinks for a second that he’s fourteen again, stuck in that first awful growth spurt where nothing fit together right. 

But back in those days, Barney’d found the whole thing hilarious, tripping him just to watch him lose his balance and laugh his ass off.

Now, Barney’s grunting, “Come the fuck _here_ ,” and dragging him out of the kitchen, down on to the shitty old couch.

Clint half-sits, half-falls into the twenty-year-old ass-divot on the center cushion, his body still trembling. Except now, the sounds that keep pouring out of his mouth aren’t laughter, they’re the kind of tears he’s never shown anybody, not even his brother, and he can’t fucking slow them down.

He sits there for what feels like a lifetime, his body betraying him until his chest and jaw both ache from clenching. He wipes his mouth and nose on one hand, his face on the other, and drags the fingers of both through his already messed-up hair. His stomach’s still way too tight, twisted into an impossible knot that’s almost impossible to breathe around.

When he finally lifts his head, Barney’s standing in the tiny kitchen that looks out over at the living room, the contents of his grocery bags spread all over the counter. There’s a couple packs of smokes, sure, but there’s also boxes of those “just add canned meat” meals and cans of vegetables.

Barney fishes something out of his pocket and tosses it over at Clint. It’s only after he catches it between his clumsy hands that he realizes it’s an open cigarette packet. Barney’s tucked a lighter inside.

“Smoke one, then man the fuck up and fix whatever the hell you just broke.”

“I don’t smoke,” he reminds his brother. His voice sounds rough and raspy, a little like Trick’s before he finally went. Barney rolls his eyes. “I don’t,” Clint presses, and throws the pack back at him.

Barney lets it bash him in the shoulder. “But you’re owning the other part?” he asks.

“What other part?”

“The part where something in your life just got fucked up.” Clint snorts at him, but the sound’s weak and wet. He rubs his nose with the side of his hand, and Barney sighs. “You know how many times you’ve come to me since you left the park? ‘Cause I can count them on one hand, and they’re all when shit in your life’s gone real bad real fast. The only difference is, you’re not kicking my ass this time.” He flashes Clint a crooked smile that reminds him a lot of the big brother he knew all those years ago, and Clint shakes his head as he looks away. When Barney wanders over to the couch a couple seconds later, he’s got the pack of cigarettes. “How much of that whole thing about your friend was _really_ about your friend?” 

Clint jerks his head away from the window. “What thing?” he asks.

“Couple weeks ago, when we had pizza. You turned all philosophical on me, remember? ‘Big B, brother who knows everything, why do fucked-up people do fucked-up things?’” Clint rolls his eyes at the same falsetto that Barney’s always pulled out to mock him, and Barney grins as he fishes out a cigarette. “How much of all that was really about your buddy, huh? Because I’m starting to think maybe that was part one of _this_.”

He gestures to Clint with his lighter, a random little circle in the space between them, and Clint drops his eyes down to his lap. Smoke drifts into his vision, the last few tendrils of Barney’s first big puff, and he sweeps them away with a flick of his wrist. They sit there for a long while, silent except for the constant buzz of the too-big air conditioning unit. 

It’s only after a car door slams somewhere out in the park, distant and too close at the same time, that Clint finally exhales. “I think Phil’s—” he starts to say, but the words stick in the back of his throat. He swallows around them, his stomach churning; when he exhales, his breath shakes almost as hard as his shoulders did, back in the kitchen. He shakes his head. “In May—hell, back before May, back at any point after I went back to work in December—everything made sense,” he says finally, his fingers clenching around one another. “Work, Phil, work _and_ Phil, all of it, it fit together, and now it’s this fucking _mess_ and I can’t—”

The words escape him again, rushing out of him like the smoke rushes out from between Barney’s lips. Next to him, his brother stares him down, eyes as alert and even as Clint’s ever seen them. He drags his fingers through his hair. “I’m working a case with a kid who somebody hurt who is so hell-bent on proving to the world that she’s tough as nails that she’d rather land in juvenile hall than tell anybody the truth,” he says. “I can’t help her, I can’t convince her to help herself, I can’t do anything but watch her fucking self-destruct and while she’s doing this, I’ve got a boyfriend who’d rather run around with some asshole from the federal prosecutor’s office than— Than—”

He glances past Barney, through the yellowed drapes and the old cracked window. Barney exhales slowly, smoke surrounding him like a hazy halo. “Than what?” he asks after a couple more seconds. 

Clint shakes his head again. “Never mind.”

Barney nods a little. This time, when he nudges the pack of cigarettes down along the coffee table, Clint fishes one out and lights up.

They sit there for a half hour or so, chain smoking cheap cigarettes in the relative silence of the living room until all the air’s choked with smoke. By the time he walks out of the trailer, Clint feels nauseous from nicotine and from his own, still-reeling brain. He stands on the porch, hot summer air assaulting his burning lungs, and rubs his face with the heels of his hands.

Barney lingers on the other side of the screen door, a smoke dangling from his lower lip. “Just talk to your guy,” he says.

Clint snorts. “‘Cause you’re the relationship expert.”

“No, I’m shit at relationships. I’m still trying to figure out why Ally sticks around.” He flashes Clint a crooked grin, and Clint feels his own mouth kick into half a smile. “But I can own that. Just like I can own when I fuck shit up with Ally and need to fix it.” Clint rolls his lips together and angles away from the door, glancing down the empty gravel lane that leads out of the park. “Saying the shit in your head makes it real,” Barney presses, “but that’s kinda how you put things back together.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “You give him a girlfriend for a couple months, he turns into Dr. Phil,” he jokes, casting one last look back at Barney.

“Been with her almost as long as you’ve been with Mr. Right, thanks,” he returns, and flips Clint off.

The house is as empty and quiet as the trailer park when Clint lets himself in, except maybe for Sandy’s happy little chirps when he walks through the door. He plucks her out from under his feet and carries her into the kitchen with him; she squirms and fights until she realizes he’s pulling down a can of the awful-smelling wet food Phil keeps buying. She purrs like a motor the whole time he dishes it out, and he stands with his ass against the counter to watch her eat. 

Her ears wriggle around when a car pulls up in the driveway, but she only stops chewing once the front door opens. Clint, on the other hand, never looks away from the damn cat.

He’s watching her tail twitch back and forth when a voice finally asks, “Clint?” It’s calm and gentle, a voice saved for the dark of the bedroom, and Clint feels his stomach twist itself into a double knot. He wonders for a second how he must look, his clothes a mess and his still face red from his meltdown in the trailer. Worse, he stinks of stale cigarette smoke and musty furniture.

He swallows around the lump in his throat. When he finally glances up, Phil’s there, hovering in the very entrance to the kitchen.

He’s in his work clothes except for the jacket, his tie loose and his sleeves rolled up, and even across the room, Clint can see the indents on his nose from his glasses. His hair sticks up in a couple places, mussed from fingers running over it, and for one split second, Clint’s overwhelmed with everything he feels for his guy. This, he thinks, his chest tightening, was supposed to be his life: a house with a home office, a cat, and the guy he loves to the end of the earth and back. A guy he’d throw himself on a fire for, a guy he fell in love with twice—once before he almost lost him, and once after.

Phil’s jaw works, but he says nothing. Clint feels his fingernails dig into the undersides of the counter. For a moment, the only sound in the room is the combined noise of Sandy eating and purring.

Clint’s voice hardly sounds like his own when he asks, “Were you even gonna tell me about the job?”

There’s a perfect beat where nothing moves—not the cat, not either of them, not the world _around_ them—and then, all of a sudden, the color drains right out of Phil’s face. His lips drop open, a soundless little _o_ , and Clint huffs out a breath. He rubs a hand over his face, but nothing really helps; Phil’s expression opens up a hole in the pit of his gut, and suddenly, he’s as hollow as he’s ever felt in his life.

“Blake told you,” Phil says after a long, long stretch of quiet. His voice sounds sticky, a million miles away, and Clint snorts as he nods at him. He can’t meet his eyes, though, so he keeps staring at the cat. “Clint, you have to understand—”

“Were you gonna tell me?” Clint repeats, his voice a little louder and ten times shakier. When he pulls his head up, Phil’s frozen in place, his hands raised out in front of him. He lowers them slowly, and Clint shakes his head. “Eight weeks,” he says, his throat tight enough that every word is a fight. “Eight weeks, I put up with this shit—no calls, no texts, weekends where I don’t see you even when you’re _here_ —and then the second you’re back—”

“Clint,” Phil breaks in, a tiny, pleading note sneaking into his voice, and Clint snaps his jaw shut as he glances at the nearest wall. Phil’s footsteps echo across the tile, closing the distance between them; Clint pushes away from the counter and steps around the island, placing it between them. When he steals a glance in Phil’s direction, it’s in time to see something like pain cross the guy’s face. “Ken sprung the job on me right before I left Denver Monday morning,” he presses, and Clint stares back down at the island. “I told him I needed to think about it, and that’s what I’ve been _doing_. I don’t even know if I’m interested, and I didn’t want to tell you when—”

“When you can make a decision all on your own?” Clint interrupts. Phil falls quiet again, and Clint snorts into the silence. “That was your whole plan, right? Decide if you want it, then maybe mention it to the guy you live with?” He drags his eyes away from the island and finally meets Phil’s gaze. His whole face is pale and drawn, his eyes wide and a little helpless. Clint shakes his head. “So instead of finding out from you, I’ve gotta find out from the guy who wants to screw you—”

“ _What_?” Phil demands, staring at him.

“—and I’m left here, stuck thinking—” The words catch suddenly, and he stumbles over them. He pushes himself further away, pacing slowly toward the back door; when he turns back around, his whole body’s trembling, caught up by the pounding of his heart in his chest. “I tried,” he says, and he pretends like he can’t hear his own voice cracking. “I tried not to take it personal, I tried not to let it bother me. You spend all this time, you know, when you think you figured it out and that you found somebody, you think they can’t mean to be an asshole, and then—” He shakes his head again, fighting against the cobwebs there. Phil stares at him, waiting, but for a second, all he can manage is a couple deep breaths. “You think you know how your life’s about to end up,” he finally forces out, “and then, all of a sudden, you find out you don’t have a fucking _clue_.”

The last word shatters like glass around them, and for one, perfect beat, Clint can read hurt on Phil’s face. Pure, unadulterated, untempered hurt, the kind of hurt that hits Clint in the gut and forces all the air out of his lungs. They look at each other, the space between them a chasm they can’t cross, and Clint watches as Phil’s throat bobs. He wets his lips—thin, pale lips, lips he’s spent the last couple minutes rolling together.

Sandy jumps off the counter and wanders away.

The room pitches into perfect silence.

“That’s not what this is,” Phil finally says. It’s a murmur in the back of his throat, the kind he saves for sleepy _I love you_ s in the dead of night. Clint’s eyes hurt, suddenly, and he twists to stare at the wall. “Clint, listen to me, if I thought for a _second_ you’d think I was _leaving_ , I—”

“Aren’t you already halfway there?” Phil jerks back, blinking, and Clint only realizes how it sounds, how sharp and accusatory, when he watches Phil’s face fall. He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, but they sting like he’s still in the smoky trailer; the longer he stands there, the more he feels his chest start to seize up. He swallows, again and again, but he still can’t breathe right. “What’d I _do_?” 

“You haven’t—”

“I fucked up my whole life, I almost got fucking _disbarred_ , and you were right there,” he says. His voice shakes, every word its own tiny tremble, but he can’t stop them. “You bring me home, you ask me to move in, we get a fucking cat, and I think— I look ten years down the line and I see you and me and our idiot friends, I see this whole _life_ , and—” He finally drops his hands to his sides. He feels the damp clinging to his eyelids and lashes, but all he sees is Phil.

Phil, staring at him, his face slack and his eyes searching.

Phil, with his loose tie and the divots from his stupid glasses, the guy he loves harder than he’s ever loved anybody—including maybe himself.

He pulls in a rough breath. His pulse pounds behind his ears.

“Take the job,” he says. It’s a whisper, a prayer, soft enough that he thinks maybe Phil’s missed it until he sees the way Phil’s shoulders slouch. He lifts his hands, a shrug and a surrender. “You wanna go, you can go, I’m not— I _can’t_ —”

The words tumble again, his tongue too thick for his mouth, and he backs up another step. Suddenly, the handle to the back door’s in his grip, his fingers curling around it. He feels his arm shake first, the rest of his body following, and he forces himself to inhale long and steady.

“Clint,” Phil says, and Clint twists to look at him again, to meet and hold his eyes across the invisible trench that’s opened up in the middle of the kitchen. His lips hang open, his eyes wide and wet, and for a second, Clint almost abandons the sinking feeling in his stomach and closes the distance. He wants to, badly, desperately enough that his heart aches; he wants to grab Phil, and kiss him, and forget about the hole in the pit of his stomach and the center of his chest.

But then he thinks about the last eight weeks—lonely, silent, empty weeks—and a city he’s never even visited. He imagines more nights like that, in an unfamiliar house with a wailing cat, and Ken Blake’s humorless face around every corner.

He shakes his head. “It’s like Maria told you,” he forces out. “You’ll do what you want anyway.”

And before Phil tries to stop him, he walks straight out their back door.

 

==

 

“You need to actually talk to him, Clint,” Natasha says, and Clint stares into the bottom of his empty coffee cup.

Natasha’s apartment smells like cinnamon and anise, a sharp smell that still floods Clint’s nose hours later. He breathes it in, hoping it’ll maybe clear his mind, but his thoughts all jumble together anyway; when he exhales, he swears he can hear Natasha sigh. Somewhere else in the apartment, Pepper’s puttering around, her bare feet quiet on the carpeting. Clint hears her pause every few minutes, and he imagines her leaning out of the kitchen or bedroom to peer into the living room and check in on things.

Her footsteps stop again, and Clint glances at Natasha in time to see her shake her head. Her curls bob, soft against her cheeks, and he hears Pepper move from the hallway to the kitchen.

He almost smiles. “Your girlfriend’s a busybody,” he says, raising an eyebrow.

“My girlfriend’s never seen you look like hell,” Natasha returns, and crosses her arms under her chest. 

Clint tries to snort a laugh, to offer her something besides raw and pointless helplessness, but he knows he’s failed when he drops his gaze back to his mug. He’d driven around aimlessly after he left the house, cruising past the judicial complex and down the main strip of town, simultaneously desperate to be alone and to find a friend. He’d stopped in at Starbucks for a coffee only to find that Cassie’d split a couple hours early; he’d driven past Wade’s apartment complex, but the teal Metro hadn’t been parked in its usual stall. He’d considered stopping by Stark’s house to talk to Bruce, but the late afternoon sky’d left him thinking about family dinners and quiet times with Miles, and Clint’d figured they deserved a couple hours peace.

He hadn’t expected Pepper to answer Natasha’s door, her long hair loose around her shoulders and her face warm and bright with laughter. But after only a couple seconds of staring at him, she’d held open the door. “I’ll get Natasha,” she’d said, and Clint’d nodded weakly.

Natasha’d sarcastically asked him who died before she’d gotten a good look at his face. She’d stopped joking around, after that.

Clint’s still studying the ring of half-dried coffee at the bottom of his mug when Natasha uncrosses her arms and leans all the way forward, her elbows on her thighs. She’s wearing jean shorts and a tank top, comfortable summer clothes, and Clint stares at the pale line of her legs instead of meeting her eyes. “Clint,” she says quietly, “you need to go home, sit down, and—”

“And say what?” he asks. His voice sounds rough and raw in his own ears, and he shakes his head. Natasha rolls her lips together. “Blake offered him a job and he didn’t even mention it. Didn’t even _think_ about telling me until after Blake showed up and—”

“Have you stopped to think why that happened?” Clint twists around on the couch to discover Pepper standing behind it, deftly balancing three coffee mugs in her grip. Natasha reaches up to take one, and Pepper smiles softly as she offers Clint one of the other two. The scent of minty herbal tea floods his nose. “I don’t usually question people’s motives—”

Natasha tilts her head. “You don’t?”

“—but don’t you wonder why Blake showed up the way he did? Days after he offered Phil a job _and_ days before Phil closes out the case in Denver?” She slides into a chair, her mug pressed between her palms. “That doesn’t sound like a coincidence to me.”

“He came to talk to Phil about something,” Clint replies, shrugging. He sets the mug on the coffee table next to his empty one and watches the steam rise out of it. “I didn’t really bother asking.”

“Of course not,” Natasha returns, and she holds up a hand when he frowns at her. “Don’t take it that way,” she defends. “I mean, of course you didn’t ask, he’d just told you that he’d offered Phil a job he thought Phil wanted to take. Nobody would’ve stopped to ask.” She pauses for a second. “Though I think some people might have stopped to punch him.”

“To translate it from Natasha’s normal brand of diplomacy,” Pepper stresses, her mouth quirking into a tiny smile, “Blake put together a perfect storm. He walked in, he told you exactly what he wanted you to hear, and then you walked out.” She shakes her head. “I’m not sure it all makes as much sense as you want it to make.”

Clint feels his frown deepen. “I don’t—”

“She means Blake’s an asshole, she’s just too polite to say it,” Natasha interrupts. Pepper smiles into her tea, shrugging one shoulder, and Natasha pushes curls out of her face before she meets Clint’s eyes. She holds his gaze for a long time in the unbroken quiet of her apartment. “You were already hurt,” she finally says, her voice low and gentle. “Blake came along, and—accidentally or otherwise—found a way to twist that knife. Because whether you knew about the job or not, you’d have to talk to Phil about it. Maybe even encourage him to take it.”

He stares at her for a couple more seconds, his brow bunching hard enough that his head starts to hurt. When he looks away, it’s to reach up and rub his forehead, smoothing out the creases there. He ends up sighing. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Doesn’t it?” Pepper asks. She sets down her mug and leans forward, a soft hand landing on Clint’s knee. When he glances over, she spares him a tiny, gentle smile. “I’ve known Phil longer than you and Natasha combined,” she reminds him, “and like a lot of people, I know for a fact that he’s one of the best prosecutors in the state, maybe even in the country. It’s pretty common knowledge.” She squeezes his knee. “But the thing that not everyone knows—and the thing I think you’re forgetting—is that he loves you.”

Clint glances away, his throat and eyes prickling. He sucks in a breath, so sharp it burns.

“The last eight weeks were hard on Phil, too,” Natasha says quietly. “Blake probably knew that—and that he’d only get under Phil’s skin if he got under yours, first.”

“That doesn’t change what happened,” he tells her.

“No,” Pepper admits, her thumb gently stroking along his slacks, “but maybe it explains _why_.”

They both walk him to the door a few minutes later, but it’s Pepper who draws him close and hugs him, her grip hard enough and fierce enough that he thinks he feels his ribs crunch. He hugs her back, smelling the mint from the tea and the remnants of her expensive perfume; when they break apart, she smiles sadly at him, her fingers lingering on his shoulder. But by time he’s back in the car, all he can smell is the baked asphalt of the parking lot and the stale cigarette smoke on his clothes.

He drives home with the windows rolled down.

Phil’s car is missing when he pulls into the driveway, and Sandy mews at him through the door until he stops fumbling with the keys and lets himself in. The almost-set sun throws long golden fingers of light along the living room floor and into the foyer. Phil’s shoes aren’t on the rug, his keys and wallet missing from the table by the door, and Clint’s stomach lurches as he glances down the hallway and realizes that Phil’s one still-packed suitcase is gone, too.

He keys bite into his palm as he walks straight into the kitchen. The silence nearly suffocates him as he flicks on the light and discovers a half-used legal pad sitting in the middle of the island. It’s one of the shitty pastel-colored ones out of the home office—a joke gift from Phil’s sister Sam the last time she sent them a care package—and even from halfway across the room, he recognizes the handwriting scrawled across the top page.

For a couple seconds, he’s tempted to turn around and walk right out of the house. He knows Bruce and Tony keep a guest room at the ready, and he’s pretty sure Darcy’s couch is really a hundred-dollar Wal-Mart futon she bought back when she and Jane roomed together. Barney’d probably let him crash at the trailer, too, and he imagines a night spent back there: stretched out on the same couch where he used to do his homework, staring out at the same tree line as twenty years ago.

But then, all of a sudden, Sandy rubs against his ankles, and he jerks out of his own head. She tips her head up at him and meows, loud as anything.

He sorts and rolls his eyes. “You’re a little shithead,” he tells her, and she head butts his shin.

He leaves the note on the island and heads to the bedroom, shedding his rumpled work clothes on the way. He turns the shower up almost as hot as possible and steps into the spray, swearing under his breath as the heat hits his skin. He scrubs every inch of his body and hair, trying to slough off his emotions as much as the scent of smoke and cinnamon; when he sees himself in the foggy mirror, exhaustion apparent on his face, he knows he’s failed miserably.

It’s only after he’s dried off and changed into shorts and a t-shirt that he returns to the kitchen—and to Phil’s note, written in black pen on pale purple paper.

_Clint,_

_I called Bruce, Wade, and Barney, and none of them know where you are. Natasha and Darcy didn’t pick up their phones. I almost called you, but I don’t know what I’d say to your voice mail. I don’t even know what to say in this note._

_I changed my Monday morning flight and am heading to Denver tonight. I’m meeting with the attorney who was on maternity leave and handing over the case to her this weekend instead of next week. I will be home Monday night at the latest. I hope we can talk, then. I hope you’re still home when I get there._

_I don’t know how to say sorry and have you believe me. I hope I can prove it to you when I come home on Monday. In the meantime, Jasper’s under strict orders to escort Ken off the premises if he comes back to the office._

_I love you. Even when I’m an idiot. I hope you realize that._

_\- Phil_

Clint stares at the note a long time after he reads it, the words swimming in his vision until they’re unrecognizable black blurs. He flips the legal pad over, shoves it to the far end of the island, and leaves it there for the night. There’s still sunlight stretching into the bedroom when he flops onto the mattress, but he ignores it to press his face into the pillow and close his exhausted, aching eyes.

It’s only after the sun’s finally dipped below the horizon that he lifts his head far enough to grope around for his cell phone. He finds it in the tangled, wrinkled slacks lying on the floor. There are about a half-dozen missed text-messages and two missed phone calls, and he deletes all of them without a second thought. Phil’s not sent him anything—probably because of the note, Clint thinks, but maybe because he’s not sure what to say. He skims through their last couple texts, rereading their mundane conversation about groceries and their horrifying lack of beer. When he thumbs open a new message, the only text remaining’s the last one from Phil, sent yesterday afternoon:

**Phil Coulson:** _I swear, I’m buying stock in whatever company owns Trojan._

Clint snorts at it for a second, a tiny smile finally cracking across his lips. When his thumbs find the keyboard on his phone, they’re surprisingly steady.

_i’ll see you monday, boss_ , he types, and sends it without a second glance.

He’s staring at the ceiling a half-hour later when Phil’s reply chimes through. _Landed safely, home soon_ , it says, and Clint only realizes he’s fallen asleep staring at it when he wakes up hours later, the phone still in his hand.

 

==

 

“I’m not totally sure I know what you’re asking,” Cody Miller says. He curls his fingers a little tighter around the rough lip of the stone bench; when Clint smiles at him, tight and courtroom-formal, he shifts his weight nervously. “I mean, I know Kate a little, but we’re not friends or anything. I’m not sure how I can help you.”

His toes wriggle in his sandals, and Clint shrugs. “I just need to know a little more about how you know one another,” he replies, and Cody nods unevenly.

It’s a sweltering-hot August Saturday, the kind where the stiff breeze feels like a furnace down the back of your neck, and even in his board shorts and baseball t-shirt, Cody’s sweating. Clint knows he’s sweating too, damp clinging to his hairline and under the arms of his shirt, but he ignores it as he watches the kid fidget around again. He’s spent a lot of time drifting around this morning, driving by the homes of Kate Bishop’s five victims and figuring out how to start unraveling the last pieces of this case. The more Cody avoids his eyes and swallows thickly, his face tipped into the shade, the more Clint kicks himself for not chasing these kids down sooner.

Then, he thinks about Phil—his distracting, frustrating, secret-keeping asshole boyfriend who’d headed back to Denver while Clint drank tea on Natasha’s couch—and his resolve hardens to steel.

It’s been a shitty couple days.

Clint wants to think he’s kept his head on straight, swallowing down his anger like a cup of Maria’s too-bitter coffee and powering through his life, but two nights of sleepless ceiling-gazing and a Friday night run so long and hard that his legs still feel like rubber bands prove otherwise. Even Darcy’d accused him of being a “whiny diaper baby” after their Friday docket, throwing the files down on his desk and slamming his office door hard enough that he felt it in his teeth. He’d tried to punish her for that, banging through his file cabinet drawers like a pissed-off five-year-old, but he’d ended up collapsed on the window ledge, pillows strewn around him and his head resting lightly against the glass. 

Truth was, he felt like a little like the whiny diaper baby he’d been back at the orphanage: helpless, lost, terrified, and lonely.

And by the time he’d snapped out of his tantrum, he’d discovered an e-mail from Judge Smithe’s chambers, requesting that he and Wade show up to a hearing about Kate’s case first thing Monday morning.

He’d left work late, laden down with every last document from the Bishop case file—the police reports, sure, but also school records, court records, notes from his meeting with Howlett, and a photocopy of America Chavez’s new criminal case—and spread them all over the kitchen island. And after his run, his lungs and legs burning, he’d showered off all the sweat and misery and started fresh.

Fresh led him to his car Saturday morning, to coffee, doughnuts, and a long driving tour of the county. He looped around Sanctuary Park and Carriage Hill, neighborhoods stacked full of mansions and Mercedes SUVs, mentally ticking off names along the way: Brandon Perkins, Dylan Brown, Evan Unger, Devan Phillips.

And now, Cody Miller, a kid who lives in a modest two-story house and who, far as Clint can tell, drives a Ford Fiesta from back in the 1990s. Cody Miller, who sat out on his front stoop when Clint pulled up, listening to music on his phone while he texted, his head bobbing to the beat. 

Cody Miller, who looks scared more than anything else, and who toes at the ground instead of meeting Clint’s eyes.

He remembers what Howlett said—nice kid, squirrelly as hell—and rolls his lips together. “Look, Cody, you’re not in any trouble here. If you don’t want to talk to me, you can say it, and I’ll walk away. But the problem I’m having with the case against Kate is that I’m still not sure why she beat you and your buddies up, and I thought you might know something about that.”

“I told the cops—”

“I know what you told the cops.” Cody bites down on his lower lip and flicks dirt off his sandal. “I also know that you didn’t tell the cops everything—that none of you did.” He watches the kid’s shoulders tighten under his t-shirt, his fingers gripping the bench even harder. “It’ll be easier on everybody if you’re honest.”

Cody snorts. “You think I’m a liar.”

“Maybe by omission, yeah,” Clint admits, and Cody goes back to dragging his foot through the dirt. “Listen, I know—”

“Have you ever been to Holy Trinity?” The kid asks it quietly, like he’s afraid he’ll cause some kind of avalanche, and Clint nods slightly in reply. “It’s not like a normal school. There’s practically a caste system there: rich kids, then scholarship kids, then legacy kids.”

Clint rolls his lips together. “Legacy kids?”

“Yeah, you know, the kids who can’t afford to go there and aren’t smart enough to go there, but some relative a hundred years ago donated part of their estate to the school or whatever.” Cody’s blond hair flops as he shakes his head. “My great-uncle helped them build their field house. He never had kids, so the deal was that my sister and I get in for pretty much free. We pay for uniforms and stuff, but otherwise . . . ”

He trails off, the words disappearing behind the usual jumble of noise that makes up a summer morning, and Clint shifts to rest his elbows on his thighs. He’s in jeans and an open-collared button-down, pretty casual and low-key, but for a second he still feels conspicuous. He shrugs. “Okay, so there’s a caste system,” he replies. “What’s that got to do with Kate Bishop?”

“Are you kidding?” the kid demands, rolling his eyes. “Kate Bishop is Holy Trinity royalty. She’s like the girl from that Matchbox 20 song, where you want to be with her but she’s a fucking disaster.” 

He spits the last two words, and Clint frowns. “Okay, but—”

“And that’s Evan’s type,” Cody presses. He runs fingers through his hair before he glances over at Clint. “That’s how it all started, okay? God, he’d kill me for talking to you, but—”

“Kate beat you all up because Evan wanted to date her?” Cody clamps his mouth shut, lips pursing into a tight line, and Clint shifts toward him on the bench. “Cody, this isn’t on you, but it could really help you if—”

“No, that’s not— No.” Cody shakes his head again, harder than before, and glances back at the ground. His face, half-shaded by the tree, hardens for a second, his shoulders squaring; when he exhales a couple beats later, though, all the steel melts away. He tosses Clint a sideways glance, somehow eighteen and eight at the same time. “Kate beat us up because of what Evan _did_ ,” he says quietly. “I mean, we were there, too, but— She beat us up because of Evan.”

A flash of surprise jolts through Clint like an electric shock, but he swallows around it and holds his face neutral. “I heard about some pictures and text messages,” he says.

Cody snorts. “You have no clue, do you?” Clint blinks dumbly, and the kid sighs, soft and slow. “No, you wouldn’t. The other guys’d never say it, Kate’d never—” He pokes at the pile of dirt he’s dug up with the toe of his sandal. “I knew the second Dylan’s mom called that lawyer, it’d end up like this. But the caste system, you know?”

“No,” Clint admits. The kid tosses a glance in his direction, almost like he’s confused, and Clint wets his lips. “Cody, I need to know what happened at that party.”

“Both parties,” Cody corrects.

“You mean birthday party back in November, too?”

“Yeah.”

“Then, yeah,” Clint says. “Both parties.”

Cody nods weakly, his fingers finally releasing the stone bench; he shifts them onto his lap and folds them tightly together, a little like when Dot Barnes says grace. “Evan’s a real dick,” he says after a couple more seconds, his voice low and hesitant. “He’s like Kate—Holy Trinity royalty, more money than god, whatever—but he— Kate’s fucked up, but I don’t think she means to be. Evan likes to shit on people just to watch them squirm.”

He shifts his weight around, stalling for a second. “He decided back when Kate started at school that they’d be this power couple,” he continues, “but Kate didn’t want to go out with him. I think she kind of hated the fact that he knew who she was—her sister was legendary, she got legendary, the whole caste system thing at work—and she definitely never gave him the time of day. And Evan—” He glances over at Clint, his face stone-cold serious. “You _give_ Evan the time of day. If he decides you’re worthy, you live up to it.”

Clint nods slightly. “Because he’s royalty,” he chimes in, and Cody nods right back. “I knew the type in high school.”

“You didn’t know anybody as bad as Evan,” Cody replies, and Clint forces a tiny smile in response. The kid watches him for a second before he continues. “Kate wanted nothing to do with him. I mean, she wasn’t rude or anything, but she made it pretty clear that they wouldn’t date. Evan figured she was, I don’t know, playing hard to get, because he kept after her. Valentine’s Day presents, asking her to dances— He got his parents to invite her to Vail with them. _Vail_.”

Clint smiles like a guy who knows where the hell Vail is. “How’d Evan feel about that?”

“How do you think?” Cody scratches fingers through his hair and drops his eyes back to the ground. “I don’t know when or why he decided it’d be a good idea, but all of a sudden, we’re seniors, and we’re at Dylan’s party, and he spots Kate with a couple other girls and—”

He trails off, shaking his head, and Clint rolls his lips together. After another hot blast of wind, he asks, “A good idea to do what?”

“Mess around with her.” When he raises his eyebrows, Cody shakes his head. “She’d had a couple drinks—everybody had—and Evan said, you know, we could help him out, be his ‘bros’ or whatever.” He squeezes his hands together ‘til his knuckles turn white. “It was so fucking stupid, and I— They maybe knew what he meant, but I just thought—”

He exhales hard, his breath shaking, and Clint only notices that his heart’s all the way up in his throat when he swallows around it. “I need to know what you mean,” he says.

Cody’s shoulders draw up tight. “You know what I mean,” he whispers, and Clint’s stomach twists when he realizes that, yeah, he _does_.

 

==

 

He finds Kate at the twenty-four hour doughnut place.

It’s after ten, the hot day now a sticky-humid night, and for the first ten minutes after he shows up, Clint sits in his car and watches Kate through the shop’s dingy front windows. Her face glows pink in the light from the florescent _open_ sign, and she sips coffee out of a paper cup while she reads from a thick paperback she’s flattened to the table. Clint imagines it’s another of the fantasy novels from her friend Teddy. She sweeps hair out of her face as she turns the page, oblivious to the hatchback in the parking lot.

For a couple seconds, Clint considers just turning around and leaving while he still can.

The day feels like it’s lasted forever. He rubs the exhaustion from his face as he thinks about his long, _lomg_ day, trying his best to clear his brain of all the clutter. Since noon, he’s called at least a half-dozen people—Jessica Jones, Thor, Wade, Hill, Howlett, Hill again—and popped in and out of the office for files and notes more times than he can fucking count. He’s drunk a lot of coffee, scarfed down a fast food burger in the car, met with Cody Miller’s hand-wringing mom—and now, he’s waiting on Kate Bishop, young and pale in the doughnut shop.

He checks his phone, finds no new messages, and heads inside.

“I thought the whole doughnut cliché only applied to cops,” Kate greets over the din of the jangling bell on the door, her face still tipped down toward her book. Clint freezes on the doormat, caught up in his own surprise, but she just twists around to flash him a dazzling smile. “Or do all the law enforcement types like their cream-stuffed long johns?”

He snorts. “You say it like that, it’s kind of disturbing.”

“That’s _why_ I said it.” Clint rolls his eyes as Kate shoves a bookmark into the middle of her book and slings an arm over the top of the booth. “But seriously, you creeped on me in the parking lot for ten minutes. I’m not even breaking curfew.”

“How do you know I was creeping on you?” he retorts, and Kate raises her eyebrows at him. The only other patron’s a college-aged kid blasting heavy metal on his iPod and head-banging as he scribbles in a notebook. “Okay, maybe I’m creeping on you.”

“When are you just going to admit that it’s part of the job?” 

“When it becomes part of the job.” Kate rolls her eyes, her face still warm with a grin as he wanders over. He slides in across from her and folds his hands on the tabletop. “We need to talk,” he says after a couple beats.

Her grin falters, fear clawing at the edges of her expression. She curls her fingers around her coffee cup. “You know, the serious voice doesn’t really suit you. You’re like the bear Muppet: all jokes, no substance.”

He frowns. “Kate—”

“No, really, you _need_ to put that face away,” she interrupts. Her voice wavers, tinged with a tiny note that borders right on the edge of hysteria, and he presses his lips together. She swigs her coffee and sets the cup down hard. “I’m not doing anything wrong, and if you’re here to be all _you_ about something, I—”

“I’m not here because you did anything.” She glances away, and he pulls in a tight breath. “I’m here because I know what happened. With Evan.”

The second the name hits the air, Kate’s entire body draws up tight. She freezes for a couple seconds, her shoulders tense and her jaw set, and then, out of nowhere, snaps apart like a rubber band. She grabs for her book so fast that she sends her cup flying, coffee splashing across the dirty tile like blood splatter from a crime scene; she slips in the mess when she stands and almost loses grip on both her book and her bag. Clint jams his knee against the underside of the table, swears, and rushes to follow.

Kate almost slams the door in his face on her way out.

“Kate!” he calls after her, the humid air choking him, but she’s already headed to her car. She digs through her bag, muttering and clumsy, and the book falls onto the cracked asphalt. Stepping over it, Clint reaches forward and catches her by the arm. “Kate, listen, I—”

“Don’t touch me!” she shrills, and whirls hard enough that she breaks his grip. She jerks her head up, her hair a black web swirling around them, and for the first time since the start of her case, Clint discovers tears in her eyes. She stares at him, blank-faced and absolutely lost, and drops her face back to her bag. “I can’t fucking believe— Everybody tells you to leave something alone, but you don’t listen, you _push_ , and then—” 

Her voice wavers, almost breaking. When Clint steps closer to her, she shrinks away. “I needed to know,” he says, and he watches as she freezes, her fingers digging hard into the strap of her bag. “Kate, the judge is gonna want to know if we can keep you on your diversion, and if I can’t give her some reason why—some explanation about why it’s okay to give you another chance after everything that’s happened—she’ll pull the rug out from under you.” Her throat bobs, and he swallows with her. “I know you don’t want that.”

“And maybe I don’t want the whole world to know I was raped, either!”

Kate’s shout echoes into the darkness, the shrill cry of some kind of wounded woodland animal, and Clint snaps his mouth shut. Kate snorts at him, throwing her hands up. “Is that what you want to hear, Barton? You want to hear about how Evan Unger cornered me when I was drunk, how he and his fucking asshole friends, they—” The words catch in the back of her throat, jumbling into a sound like a sob, and she stops just long enough to draw in a deep, trembling breath. Angry tears roll down her red cheeks, and she swipes them away with the heel of her hand. “You want to hear how they got lawyers before I could even tell my dad what happened?” she presses, and this time, she lets her voice shake. “How my dad called me a couple days later and told me that, hey, he and Evan’s dad talked, and how they were sorry about the _misunderstanding_?” She jerks her head, a choppy shake. “Because that’s not _your_ story, Barton, that’s mine, and you can’t fucking _have_ it.”

She jabs two fingers in the air, a gesture Clint swears he feels in the pit of his stomach, and he swallows around it as he raises his hands. “I don’t want your story,” he promises. She rolls her eyes. “Kate, I _don’t_. But I do wanna help you, to present mitigating circumstances to the judge so she—”

She huffs and tosses her head. “You and your fucking lawyer jargon can go right to hell.”

“Even when it can keep you out of juvenile detention?” Clint demands, and Kate immediately twists away from him. There’s still a good ten feet of distance between them, all cracked asphalt and faded parking lines, and Clint steps closer even though it puts him in range of a slap—or worse. “Kate, there are a dozen people out there who wanna do everything they can to help you. Do you realize that? Me, Wade, Jess Jones, we’d all work our asses off to keep you out of trouble, to lock up those boys who hurt you and throw the key in fucking river. Or if we can’t do that, we’d at least find a way to keep them from messing with you again so you don’t have to beat the shit out of them the next time you end up at the same party.”

She snorts a little, her arms crossing under her chest, and stares out across the empty parking lot. He thinks for a second she’ll smile, but instead, she just shakes her head. “You’re the prosecutor,” she reminds him. “You don’t give a shit.”

“Since when?” 

“Since—” Her voice sticks in the back of her throat, and she shakes her head again, hard enough that Clint thinks he can feel his own jaw rattle. A hot, angry flush climbs up her cheeks as she glances back to him. “No, you know what? Even if it could help me, even if you’re the knight in shining armor you keep pretending to be—Clint Barton, lawyer friend to everyone—you still have _no_ right to know this. Why the hell is it anybody’s goddamn business what happened to me, huh? Why should I tell anybody anything when I’m doing just fine without—”

“Because that’s what human beings fucking _do_ , Kate!” Clint shouts, and the words crackle in the night air. He throws up his hands and paces away from her. “I did the same damn thing you did, okay? I took the worst thing that ever happened to me and I bottled it up so tight that nobody ever needed to know, and it almost ruined my life!” He jabs a finger at her. “And you know what else? Even now, it keeps almost ruining my life, ‘cause it still fucks around with my head and leaves me wondering if I’m good enough for _anything_ , whether—” 

His voice cracks like he’s thirteen again, and he stops. He rubs a hand over his face and down the side of his neck, his whole body shaking, and forces himself to breathe around the thickness in the back of his throat. 

“It’s what you have to do,” he says after a couple seconds, his arms dropping to his sides like lead weights. “You don’t want to tell me or anybody else all the details, fine, but when you’ve got people in your corner, people who _love_ you—” He shakes his head. “You’ve gotta trust somebody, Kate.”

She snorts. She’s staring at the ground, her face masked by shadow. “It’s just that easy, is it?”

“No,” he admits, and Kate jerks her head up to stare at him. Her eyes are wet, and for a second, Clint wonders if his are, too. “Trust, it— It’s the hardest fucking thing in the world, but it’s what we have to do,” he presses, and watches Kate swallow. “‘Cause otherwise, we start waking up in an empty room—an empty fucking _life_ —without ever knowing how we got there, and we’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves.”

His words drift away slowly, carried off to god-knows-where on a sticky summer breeze, and in the silence, he and Kate stare at one another. Tears cling to her eyelashes and slide down her cheeks, the anger fading away into something a thousand times softer; Clint’s heart slows, no longer throbbing in his ears, and he feels his fists slowly uncurl. Wetting his lips, he ducks down and picks up the book at his feet. After he dusts off the cover and straightens her bookmark, he holds it out to her.

She stares at it for a couple seconds, the paperback olive branch dangling between them. When she finally accepts it, it’s with a tiny, halfway-shy smile. 

She steps away from him after that, turning to lean her back against the side of her car, and tips her head up to the night sky. Clint follows suit, the metal and glass warm through his shirt as he peers out at the silver pin-prick stars. He picks out the two constellations he knows—both of them the dippers, ‘cause who _doesn’t_ recognize those?—and stares at them ‘til they start to blur into weird silvery lines.

“Worst thing that’s ever happened to you, huh?” Kate finally asks, and he drops his eyes away from the sky to glance over at her. She watches him carefully, curious as a five-year-old; when he hesitates for a second, she jabs her elbow into his side. “It’s only fair, after all that—stuff.”

She waves a hand, and Clint snorts a little. “I maybe knocked over a convenience store back when I was your age,” he admits after a couple beats. Her mouth drops open, and he almost laughs at the shock running across her face. “Not on my own, but with my brother and a couple other guys.”

“And guns?”

He shrugs, nodding, and Kate releases the kind of sustained, low whistle that always makes him roll his damn eyes. It’s only after he’s settled back against the car, his head lolled back against the roof, that she adds, “I didn’t know they let violent felons become prosecutors.”

“They don’t,” he replies, “but screwed-up kids who’re trying to start their lives over are a different story.”

The silence sweeps back over them, calm and companionable as the minutes all blend together. A couple scruffy graduate-student types in tank tops and yoga pants show up to the doughnut place with laptop bags, the head-banger leaves with his notebook under his arm, and still, there’s the two of them, staring at the stars. Clint wonders for a second how they look to the outside world, a guy in his thirties and a sixteen-year-old girl, but then, he decides it doesn’t really matter.

There’s no royalty here, no teenage caste system or bizarre workplace politics. Instead, there’s just a screwed-up kid and a screwed-up adult, each of them bobbing around with their boatload of secrets and trying, somehow, to stay afloat.

He’s still thinking about all that when Kate asks, “So, what happens next?” He jerks out of his own head to glance down at her, and she shrugs, her hands buried in her pockets. “Believe it or not, I really don’t want to go to juvenile detention.”

Clint snorts a little, a smile pressing at the corner of his mouth. “You’d do so well there,” he jokes, and she digs her elbow into his ribs. “Seriously, I talked to Wade,” he says, holding up a hand when she threatens to jab him again, “and I think I’ve got a couple ideas—if you trust me.”

She rolls her eyes. “Don’t be a dumbass,” she chides, and this time, Clint actually smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is implied in the comics that, prior to becoming a Young Avenger, Kate was sexually assaulted by strangers. She reveals this fact to Jessica Jones, but no one else—at least, that we know of. It is also implied that her experience helps encourage her to become the ass-kicking Young Avenger we now know and love. Obviously, I’ve reshaped canon to fit this universe’s needs.
> 
> I realize that Clint could be read as a jackass when he pushes Kate to share her trauma. But I also think a big part of Kate’s character is her quiet desire to be challenged and pushed, and I don’t think she’d share her experience without the push. Clint and Kate are both flawed creatures who rely on other people to make them better; that’s part of why they are such great friends in canon, and such a good match in this story.


	15. Still Hurting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, Clint realizes that sometimes, acknowledging the fact you’re hurt is the first step to healing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Sua sponte_ is a term used when a court does something on its own authority, rather than waiting for the parties to request something.
> 
> The hearing in this chapter is probably not representative of hearings in reality. Again: creative license to fit all the puzzle pieces together. Also, judicial notice works a little differently than is represented below, but for the record: judicial notice is the process by which a court may recognize the contents of its own files or other easily-proven facts (like, for instance, the time of sunset on a given day). 
> 
> Thanks as always to my fantastic betas, Jen and saranoh, who have weathered another long story with me. Thanks especially to saranoh, who especially helped when dealing with some of Phil’s choices throughout this story.

“The State calls Cody Miller to the stand, your honor,” Clint says, and Cody Miller snaps out of his seat like a jack-in-the-box.

It’s Monday morning in Judge Smithe’s courtroom, and the rain outside pours hard and loud enough that Clint swears he can hear it in his teeth as he stands at the podium and waits for Cody to cross the well of the courtroom. He’d tossed and turned through a mostly-sleepless night, planning out questions and argument in his head like an obsessed first-year law student; when the thunder started around five in the morning, he’d dragged himself out of the bedroom and stood in the kitchen, watching the rain pour down. He’d splashed through puddles on his drive into the office, shook damp out of his hair on his way up the stairs, and he thinks his socks might still be a little wet.

He misses the humidity. Well, almost.

“Raise your right hand,” Judge Smithe instructs, and Cody freezes next to the witness stand for a second, staring at his hands. He figures out which one’s the right, raises it, and shakily swears to tell the truth. The microphone crackles as he tilts it closer to him, and Clint watches him swallow.

Clint offers him a tiny smile. “State your name for the record.”

“Uh, it’s Cody Miller.”

“And how old are you, Cody?”

“Eighteen.”

“And do you know why you’re here today?” The kid nods, shifting around in the chair and making the vinyl creak. Clint tries to hold onto his smile. “I need you to answer with words, Cody.”

“Oh.” He flattens his hands to the witness stand and stares at them. “I’m here to, uh— I’m here to explain why Kate beat us up,” he says haltingly. “And why all of this between her and us happened.”

“And by Kate,” Clint asks, glancing over his shoulder at the defense table, “you mean Kate Bishop, the juvenile in this case?”

“Yeah,” Cody answers, and Clint releases the breath he’s spent the last day and a half holding.

Sunday, like Saturday, was packed with so many back-to-back calls that Clint’d spent half the afternoon sitting on the bedroom floor with his phone plugged into the wall outlet. He’d argued with Thor and Hill on the world’s loudest conference call, he’d hashed out changes to half-assed charging documents he’d cobbled together on his laptop with Steve, he’d bickered with Jessica Jones about her thin red line of secrecy, and finally, he’d talked to Kate. Kate, who sounded young and distant on the phone, her voice a thousand miles away.

“This is crazy,” she’d told him at the end of the conversation.

He’d frowned and dragged his face away from the legal pad he’d spent the day scribbling all over. “You not a fan?”

“No, I’m still on board, I’m just reminding you that it’s crazy,” she’d replied, and the laughter in her voice’d coaxed a smile out of Clint.

He’d held onto the smile for the rest of the night, even when a text message interrupted his very important channel surfing.

**Phil:** _I wanted to let you know that almost all the loose ends are tied up. I’ll be home as soon as I can be tomorrow._

He’d spent two entire commercial breaks staring at the text before he’d finally managed to type out, _i’ll see you then, boss_.

Phil never replied, but then again, it’d been pretty late, and way past his bedtime.

On the witness stand, Cody shifts again, and Clint tries his best to summon up another little smile. “Before we get to Kate, I want to talk about what’s happening in this courtroom today, okay?” he asks, and Cody nods for a second before he remembers to answer aloud. “You’ve been here since the hearing started, right?”

“Right.”

“And you heard what Judge Smithe had to say about the purpose of this hearing, and about Kate Bishop, right?”

Cody nods jerkily. “Right.”

Judge Smithe’d entered the room like a whirlwind of black robes that morning, and—after calling court to order and asking for appearances—she’d pulled off her glasses and rubbed her temple. “I know that it’s unusual for the court—any court, but especially this one—to call a _sua sponte_ status conference, but this is a serious case,” she’d said. “I’ve got two of the victims’ families calling me and claiming that Miss Bishop is a menace to society; just last week, I had another juvenile offender admit to keying cars on her friend’s behalf.” Kate’d glanced down at her hands, and Clint’d caught himself nervously tapping his pen against his legal pad. “I need something from the parties—proffers, testimony, anything—to justify what is happening in this case, and why no one’s filed a motion to revoke Miss Bishop’s diversion.” Her sharp eyes had drifted to Kate, settling there. “And I need to know I can trust the attorneys who trust you, Miss Bishop.”

“Actually, your honor, we have a plan for that,” Clint’d replied, and she’d nodded to him before he stepped up to the podium and called Cody’s name.

He nods to Cody now, his hands resting lightly on the podium, and throws one half-second glance over his shoulder. Kate’s sitting stiffly, her hands clenched in her lap while Wade clicks his pen in a messy, syncopated rhythm. Behind them, Jessica Jones sits between Heather Bishop and Cody Miller’s mom. She lifts her chin a couple degrees, and Clint hazards a smile.

Her mouth twitches. Good enough for him.

“So you know that we’re here to find out a little more about Kate Bishop and the circumstances surrounding her criminal case, right?” Clint asks.

Cody’s throat bobs as he swallows. “Yeah.”

“Now, you and I, we talked a couple times over the weekend,” Clint continues, and the kid nods along. “And like I said when we talked with your mom, I don’t need all the details from you about what happened between you and Kate.” He feels Judge Smithe’s eyes on him, frowning and unyielding, and his grip tightens on the podium. “But I need you to give us a feel of how you know her. You can do that, right?”

“Yeah,” Cody agrees. There’s a surge of confidence in the back of his tone, and for the first time since he sat at the witness stand, he raises his head to glance up at the judge. “I want to do the right thing. I don’t want Kate to end up in jail because of everything that happened.”

“Then let’s start at the beginning, with you explaining how you know Kate Bishop,” Clint prompts, and Cody starts talking.

They run through the basics like a well-oiled machine: how long Cody’s known Kate, how often they saw each other at school, how often they saw each other outside of school, whether they considered themselves friends. “We were maybe acquaintances,” Cody explains, shrugging slightly. “I think we probably wouldn’t’ve talked much if it wasn’t for Evan.”

“Without going too far into it, Evan’s another one of Miss Bishop’s victims in this case, yeah?” Clint asks, ticking off another of the questions on his legal pad.

“Yeah,” Cody echoes, nodding. “He’s a little crazy about Kate.”

Clint lets Evan’s crush slide for a couple minutes more, focusing a little more on the group of boys as a whole and their place in Holy Trinity’s crazy, high-class culture. Cody’d talked a lot on Saturday about how he only fit in because of his rich friends and the pressure he’d felt to keep fitting in, and Clint pulls that out of him carefully. He’s not ready to paint Cody as some sort of angel in disguise—he’s not a kid caught up in his circumstances, he’s a kid who picked the wrong friends and suffered for it, something Clint knows a whole lot about—but he wants to be fair.

Finally, he sets his pen down on the podium and looks across the well of the courtroom ‘til Cody meets his eyes. “Did you get to the point where you and your friends, you kind of developed a more adversarial relationship with Kate Bishop?”

Cody pulls in a big breath. “Yeah,” he admits, “we did.”

“Can you tell me more about that?”

“Yeah, sure,” the kid replies, and he runs his fingers through his floppy hair when he exhales. He glances over at defense table for a second, and Kate squares her shoulders like she’s waiting for a blow. “Like I said, Evan really liked Kate,” he explains carefully, his attention shifting over to the judge’s bench. “She didn’t want anything to do with him, but he was pretty, I don’t know, intense about it. The more she turned him down, the more he harassed her about it—just in person for a while, but then on the phone, at school, anywhere he could. The other guys and I joined in, too, helped figure out if she’d be at a certain party so Evan could bug her there. It, uh—” He pauses, shaking his head a little. “It got pretty bad.”

He tucks his hands into his lap, his shoulders tightening, and Clint tries hard not to seize up with him. “And it came to a head at one point, yeah?” Cody nods before he remembers to answer aloud, and Clint shoots him the most reassuring smile he can force out. “Can you tell the court when that happened?”

“November,” Cody answers, and raises his eyes to meet Clint’s. “The very end of November, at Dylan’s birthday party.”

“And that’s Dylan Brown, another one of the victims?” Clint clarifies.

“Yeah, exactly.”

Clint nods once, mostly to himself, and grabs the stack of documents that he’d brought with him to the podium. When he glances over his shoulder, Wade grins at him and flashes him the world’s most enthusiastic thumbs-up. Clint rolls his eyes. “Your honor, if I can approach, I’ve got some documents I’d like the court to take judicial notice of.”

“You may,” Judge Smithe says. A tiny note of confusion creeps into her voice as Clint crosses the courtroom and lays five paper-clipped packets of papers in front of her. She slides on her glasses to read them, and Clint watches as surprise treks across her face. “Are these—”

“Charging documents for four criminal cases and one juvenile case that Mister Rogers filed this morning,” Clint informs her as he rounds back to the podium. “To respect everybody’s privacy, I’ll just say that they’re all stemming from the party in November, where those five boys were the aggressors and Miss Bishop was the victim.”

The judge nods for a moment, her head still tipped down toward the papers. Clint can’t quite read her expression, but her brow’s tight. “And your witness is included in the five?”

“Yeah, your honor,” Clint admits. She glances up at him, and he shrugs slightly. “Mister Miller’s agreed to cooperate with our office, but we weren’t willing to let him off.”

“These are serious charges, Mister Barton.”

“It was a serious night, judge,” he replies.

For one, too-swift second, he thinks he catches her mouth tipping into a tiny smile, but it disappears the second she shifts toward defense table. “Any objections to the court taking judicial notice of these cases, Mister Wilson?” she asks.

“Absolutely and totally no objections now or ever,” Wade answers, and Clint swears that there’s amusement in Smithe’s voice when she asks him to proceed.

He straightens his legal pad for a second before he continues, though, his heart no longer in his mouth but still hovering somewhere high in his throat. The thunder outside carries into the room, a rumble that shakes the back of his teeth, and he draws in a breath. “With criminal case pending, I don’t want details about what happened in November, or even what happened at the party in May because I don’t want you to incriminate yourself,” he tells Cody, and the kid nods at him. “But I need to know: did you tell the police everything that happened on the night where Miss Bishop physically assaulted you and your friends?”

Cody wets his lips. “No,” he admits, “I didn’t.”

“Can you explain what happened that night?” Clint asks. “Leaving out anything that might be held against you in your criminal case.”

“Yeah, sure,” Cody replies. He brushes his hair out of his face and looks up at Judge Smithe. “I wasn’t in the room when everything kicked off,” he explains after a couple seconds, “but I know that Evan was really obsessed with whether Kate’d be there. He’d asked around a lot, sent her a bunch of texts, had _us_ text her, you name it. And I didn’t think she’d come—we hadn’t seen her out anywhere after what happened in November, because, well.” He glances over at Kate. Her shoulders are still tight, but for the first time all hearing, Clint’s not worried she’ll bolt right out of the room. “Nobody’d want to come out after what happened. I didn’t even want to go out, but Evan—”

He trails off, the words retreating into the back of his throat, and shifts to meet Clint’s eyes. Clint offers him a tiny nod, and he nods back. “Anyway, I knew Kate showed up when Dylan came and grabbed me from the kitchen,” he continues. “Pretty much everybody was in the great room—that’s where the, uh, keg was—and Kate, she was— Evan walked up to her, and anyway—”

His voice catches uncomfortably, and Clint feels his heart rate pick up a little; for a second, he’s afraid that all his conversations with the kid’ll disintegrate into dust because of nerves. But then, out of nowhere, Cody clears his throat. “Evan walked up to her,” he says, certainty creeping into his tone, “and grabbed her arm. He’d been drinking—we’d all had probably too much beer—and I don’t know what he said to her, but she’d told him not to touch her and to walk away. But he got in her face about it, really aggressive, and that’s when she kicked him.”

“Just kicked him?” Clint asks carefully. 

“At the start, yeah,” Cody responds, nodding. “Everybody kind of knew she does fencing and martial arts and all this stuff, so I don’t think it really surprised me, but— Well, it was kind of obvious that she wasn’t drinking.” He glances down at his hands. “Because, then Devan jumped in—”

“Devan Phillips?”

“Yeah. He went to grab her, and Brandon did too, and everything sort of went south after that.” He shakes his head. “We all agreed to tell the cops that she just freaked out without any warning or whatever,” he says after a second, “but really, it was because of Evan. I really don’t think she would’ve done anything if he hadn’t gotten in her face.”

Clint picks up his pen and tries not to drum it nervously against the side of his legal pad. “And that’s the last run-in you had with Kate Bishop?”

Cody raises his head. “Yeah,” he answers immediately. “The other guys, they texted her some, and there was this thing at school with some spray paint Devan lifted from a hardware store, but I tried to stay out of it.” He glances over at the defense table for a split second. “I’m really sorry,” he adds after another beat, and Clint watches as Kate jerks her head up from her lap. “I know that means pretty much nothing, but I’m really, really sorry.”

He finds Kate’s eyes, and she dips her head away again. “Nothing further, your honor,” Clint says, and he only really manages to breathe again when he sits down at counsel table.

Wade decides not to question Cody—part of the deal Clint’s spent the last two days brokering is that Wade keeps his mouth shut during the hearing and resists his natural urge to derail the whole thing—and once the kid sits down, Clint rises from his crappy vinyl chair again. Kate glances up at him, her expression the young, open one he remembers from the previous fall, and he rolls his lips together as they stare each other down. At least, until she rolls her eyes and mouths _dork_.

Then, stupidly, he smiles. 

“Your honor, I know that it’s probably pretty common for my office to revoke a diversion agreement in a situation like this one,” he says, his fingers pressed to the table top. “The juvenile stopped showing up to therapy, she skipped out on pretty much all the requirements of her diversion agreement, and she ran off for a night. Plus, like the court said earlier, there were a couple days where everybody thought she’d keyed her victims’ cars, and we only figured out she didn’t when somebody else came in and pretty much said, ‘I did this for Kate.’” Judge Smithe nods a little, removing her glasses, and Clint swallows around his amped-up nervousness. “But what we know now—something the State and defense didn’t know back when this case started—is that these criminal charges against Miss Bishop stemmed from something a lot bigger, and that her victims have pretty much been harassing her since that first incident. That doesn’t excuse her behavior, but I think it explains it. And I think it earns her a second chance, enough that the State’s not requesting to take her off her diversion.”

He sits down, his leg jiggling for a nervous second as the judge shifts to glance at Wade. He rockets out of his chair and runs his hands along his charcoal blazer (worn with black pants). “The defense pretty much agrees one hundred and ten percent with the State, which I know is weird but is also kind of true in this case,” he says. “But I just quick wanted to add, on my client’s behalf and everything, that she really is planning to follow the diversion agreement this time. She made a stupid mistake by not following it—I guess therapy got a little intense and she decided she needed a break, and then stuff at home got sticky or whatever, just a big ball of wibbly-wobbly _bad_ —but she knows that.” He glances down at Kate, who sits up straighter and offers the judge a tiny, tight smile. “And she pinky swore that she’d never screw it up again.”

Judge Smithe raises an eyebrow. “Pinky swore?” 

“And turned around three times and spat on the ground, which I guess is standard pinky swear procedure.” Wade shrugs. “I don’t know, I learned it from a nine-year-old who had to write it all down for me, maybe something got lost in translation.”

The judge rolls her lips together to hide her smile, but the corners of her eyes crinkle in a way that, for just a second, reminds Clint of Phil. He pushes the thought out of his head as hard as he can, though, and watches as the judge folds her hands atop the bench. Kate pulls in a breath and holds it, her chin jutting out proudly. “Miss Bishop?” the judge asks. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

Her jaw clenches as she pushes to her feet, her hands falling to her sides, and Clint watches her fingers curl into soft fists. “I, uh,” she starts, but her voice wobbles, and she shakes her head quickly. When she tosses a glance over in Clint’s direction, he raises his eyebrows at her. “There’s a lot of stuff I never told my lawyer in this case,” she says after another deep breath, “and there’s a lot of stuff I’ve been trying to pretend never happened. I can’t really do that anymore. I need to face it better than I’ve been doing.” She turns back to the judge. “I’d like a chance to do that. I’m not a menace to society, I’m just still hurting.”

Her face shifts at the last two words, almost like she’s surprised by them, and she drops hard into her chair. Clint expects she’ll hide her face away again and maybe catch her breath, but then Wade knocks his elbow lightly into the side of her arm and she elbows him back.

Clint’s never been so happy to see a sixteen-year-old kid act a little like a sixteen-year-old kid.

But on the bench, the judge closes Kate’s file and folds her hands on top of it. “This is a difficult case,” she says carefully, and Clint feels the bottom drop out of his half-second flash of happiness. “It was a difficult case when the State filed it, and that’s not going to change. And that makes my job harder, because it means I don’t have a clear-cut solution in front of me.” Her gaze flickers between Clint and Wade before it settles on Kate. “But I can’t look two experienced attorneys in the face and tell them their instincts are wrong, especially when I agree with them. And in light of everything I’ve just found out about you and your victims, I think it would be unfair not to give you one more _very_ limited bite at the apple.” A smile shoots across Kate’s face, but the judge stops it by raising a single finger. “But I promise, if you come before this court again, all bets are off. Do you understand me?”

“Absolutely, your honor,” Kate replies, and it’s then and only then that Judge Smithe smiles back at her.

Court adjourns immediately after that, Kate shooting out of her chair like a rocket and, through either voodoo or just weird timing, landing in Wade’s grip for a very awkward two-second hug. They jerk away from one another, Kate laughing and Wade bright red, and then the girl’s beaming at other people: Jones first, then her step-mom and, finally, Clint. Clint smiles back at her, nodding slightly, and she rolls her eyes. “Loosen up, Barton,” she tells him.

“Eh, he doesn’t really believe in smiling,” Wade chimes in, and Clint flicks a paperclip at him.

Clint tucks his file under his arm and leaves them to their little moment of victory—he’s got a couple more hearings to handle, plus a pissed off trial assistant to bribe with coffee and a very sincere apology. But the one time he glances back over his shoulder, he discovers that Kate and Cody are facing one another, not really making eye contact as he talks and she listens. Something tight and warm coils in Clint’s gut at the sight of them, it’s only when he’s halfway up the stairs that Clint recognizes the feeling’s a combination of worry and hope.

The rain pelts his office window as he digs into his bag for his cell phone. _i kind of kicked ass today, you should’ve been here to see it_ , he types, and sends it off without even a second thought.

_I never expect anything less from you_ , Phil replies immediately, and the hope in Clint’s belly wins out.

 

==

 

“I’m allowed to have victory drinks, thank _you_ ,” Clint informs Natasha a good ten hours later, and she rolls her eyes as she slides the last bottle of beer away from him.

There’s still rain pouring down outside the bar, a torrential monsoon nightmare that’s turned pretty much every drainage ditch in the county into a white water rapid. They’re under a flash flood warning _and_ a brand new severe thunderstorm warning; even as Clint reaches for his beer, thunder crashes outside, and the lights in the bar flicker ominously. The bartender swears as he flicks around on the TV for a channel that’s not a mess of static and lands on _Downton Abbey_.

The theme music distracts Natasha for a half-second, and Clint reclaims his beer.

He feels justified in the buzz that’s running through him, his whole body warm and fuzzy like his cat, and he grins as he necks the bottle. Natasha glares at him, her arms crossed and her red fingernails digging into her arms, but she keeps her mouth shut about it, too. She knows he deserves this last victory beer.

“Our powers combined saved Kate from a whole bunch of shit, but since it was mostly you I think you’ve earned this,” Wade’d declared a half-hour earlier, and he’d slammed the bottle down so hard that foam erupted out of the top. A couple napkins and Wade’s shiny yellow tie died in an attempt to mop up the mess.

It’d been Clint’s fourth or fifth beer, he can’t remember, and it’d splashed across his tongue as Wade’d patted him on the shoulder and headed off to Nate’s for the night. Darcy, Bruce, and Thor’d split shortly after, all of them with excuses—skinny boyfriends, hearings in the morning, babies at home—and Pepper’d lingered just long enough to kiss Natasha on the corner of the mouth and murmur a goodnight. Clint and Natasha’d both watched her walk out of the bar, all killer heels and pale legs, and Natasha’d flicked his ear good-naturedly when he’d accidentally let out a low whistle. “If you’re drunk enough to be checking out women, I’m leaving,” she’d warned him.

“I’m always willing to check out you and your sexy girlfriend,” he’d returned, and that’s when Natasha’d started trying to confiscate his beer.

The bottle’s almost empty, and it’s warm and bordering on foamy, but he drinks it with resolve as Natasha nurses the tail end of a sparkling water. The bar’s winding down for the night, half-empty and way too quiet for Clint’s taste, and the longer he sits there, the more he’s reminded of his empty house. He’d stopped by after work to feed the cat and ended up walking back out in record time, his chest tight from missing Phil—and then, from the thought of Phil finally coming home.

But Phil’s flight got cancelled thanks to the storm, trapping him in Denver probably all night. And every hour he’s delayed feels like another nail in a coffin Clint can’t see, or like the next set of chords in a funeral dirge.

He thinks about the word _dirge_ for a second and chuckles.

Natasha sighs. “I’m going to settle up our bill,” she informs him, and he waves her off as he swigs more lukewarm beer.

Aside from the usual crop of hearings and hours of docket prep, Clint’s mostly spent his day drifting between the heady high from the morning juvenile hearing and the sinking low of waiting for Phil to finally come home from Denver. He’d tried to push the guy out of his mind after their quick text message exchange and focus on all his Monday responsibilities, but he’d kept checking his phone like a nervous teenage girl. His mind’d betrayed him over and over, summoning up all the questions he’d spent the last three days ignoring: Why did Blake show up at the office unannounced? Had the guy convinced Phil to take the job in Denver? If Phil took the job, would he ask Clint to head to Colorado with him?

If he asked, would Clint actually _go_?

The questions circle back into his head, twisting like a spiral in a spiral, and he slams back the rest of his beer without tasting it. Natasha materializes at his elbow, her eyebrows raised, and he wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “It got warm,” he tells her.

“I’m sure that’s why you chugged it like a frat boy,” she replies dryly, and catches him by the arm when the floor shifts under his feet.

She drives him back home in silence, her car splashing through inches-deep standing water every time she pulls into the right lane, and Clint listens to the rain pour down as he rests his temple against the passenger side window. For the first time since the weekend, he can admit to the nagging voice in the back of his head that, yeah, solving Kate’s mystery served as a distraction from Phil, something to keep him busy in his guy’s absence. He thinks for a second maybe Phil knew that all along and that he’d discouraged Clint from diving down too deep because he worried Clint might hurt himself.

But then, he remembers that Phil’s not been around enough to know whether he’s hurting, and his stomach swims. He closes his eyes for the rest of the drive.

Sandy greets him and Natasha at the door, weaving around their wet feet and purring the second Clint flicks on the hall light. The bulb’s too bright, forcing him to squint as he trips out of his shoes; Natasha steps easily out of her heels and follows him down the hallway. He bats her away when she reaches for his arm again, then jams his shoulder into the doorframe. When he swears under his breath, she smiles.

“You didn’t eat dinner, did you?” she asks. She sounds amused, almost chuckling.

He rolls his eyes at her. “I’m not a lightweight,” he returns, but he fumbles with the buttons on his shirt, anyway.

She shakes her head at him and disappears, her bare feet silent as she wanders down the hall. He thinks he hears water running in the kitchen, but he’s too busy fighting with his damn shirt to care. He ends up tugging it over his head and throwing it half-heartedly at the hamper. He misses by about two feet, one of Phil’s pet peeves; the second he remembers how bad Phil hates clothes on the floor, he leaves it there.

He’s not a spiteful asshole, he swears, but his boyfriend’s trapped in Denver and might want to move there. 

He drops onto the edge of the bed and scrubs his hands over his face. “Fuck,” he mutters, and closes his eyes when the room swims.

“Drink this,” Natasha says, her voice sudden and quiet as the bed dips under her weight, and Clint lifts his head up to discover she’s holding out a glass that’s fizzing with Alka-Seltzer. “You have docket tomorrow,” she reminds him. “The last thing you need is a killer hangover.”

“I’m great when I have a hangover.”

“The Christmas party proves you wrong.” He wrinkles his nose as he accepts the glass. The first sip nearly gags him, but Natasha just quirks an eyebrow at him until he swallows. “I hope tonight isn’t the prologue to you doing something incredibly dumb,” she says after a couple seconds.

“Like what?” 

“Like breaking up with Phil.”

He rolls his eyes. “Because I have the control over that situation,” he mutters.

“You have exactly as much control over this situation as you want to, Clint, and you know it,” she returns, and he snorts as he forces down another disgusting gulp. “Ever since Phil left for Denver, you’ve been lying to him _and_ yourself, pretending like you don’t miss him when the rest of us have watched you fall apart.” He stares down at the glass, his throat suddenly too thick to speak. “Even after Laufeyson and Killgrave, you’d still rather keep all your cards close to the vest instead of sharing them with the people who love you. And maybe that’s fine when it’s Bruce or me or Wilson, but with Phil?” She sighs. “Clint, if you keep doing this with Phil, he’ll slip through your fingers and you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself.”

He nods weakly, still watching the bubbles break on the surface of the water. “I told Kate that.”

“What?”

“She never told anybody what happened to her—not Wade, not her step-mom, nobody but her dad and Jessica Jones, far as I know—and the things that kept coming out of my mouth, they were more about me than about—” He shakes his head, the cobwebs clogging up his brain and his tongue, and finally glances over to where Natasha’s silently staring him down. “I didn’t want to make him pick between this big opportunity and the guy he lives with,” he says after a couple more seconds. “I didn’t want him to end up regretting _me_.”

“But why _would_ he?” He shrugs. “No, Clint, I’m asking you an honest question: why would Phil regret you? Do you know how many relationships he’s been in before you? Honest, _real_ relationships that leave him smiling at the end of the day?” He sips the Alka-Seltzer instead of answering, and she rolls her eyes. “You make him happy. And I’m sorry, but any man who is willing to live with you and your inability to throw away your condom wrappers must really love you.”

He snorts a laugh. “I’m never asking you to help me move again,” he warns her.

She grins. “Good,” she replies, and nudges her arm against his.

He grins back for a second, his face warm from something other than booze for the first time in the last couple hours, and she squeezes his knee gently. “I once fell in love with somebody who didn’t deserve it,” she says after a few seconds, and he almost chokes on the last half-swallow of Alka-Seltzer. She shakes her head. “I had to learn a lot of things very quickly because of him, and the one thing that stuck with me is that part of loving somebody is believing that they believe in you. Even when they hurt you, or when they lie, you have to believe that you’re in their heart.” He glances over at her, and she offers him one tiny, fleeting smile. “I think you still believe that about Phil.”

“I do,” he admits quietly, nodding. “Even if I never believed you’d turn sentimental on me.”

Natasha laughs and pats his leg gently. “You tell anyone, I’ll kill you,” she informs him.

“I don’t doubt it,” he replies, and squeezes her hand.

 

==

 

The bed dips again in the stupid-early hours of the morning.

In his hazy, half-asleep stupor, Clint assumes for a couple seconds it’s the cat, returning to him after a middle-of-the-night snack break. Rain still patters against the windows, a soft drizzle that almost lulls Clint right back to sleep—until he smells the rain, cool and crisp, right there in the bedroom. The scent fills his nostrils, jerking him awake in record time, and he tangles himself up in the sheets as he fights to roll over.

Sitting on the far end of the bed, Phil smiles softly at him in the dark. “Go back to sleep,” he murmurs, and there’s exhaustion in his voice and his eyes.

His hair and shirt are plastered to his skin and darker from the rain, and for a couple seconds, all Clint can do is stare at him: the line of his shoulders, the bare skin under his open collar, the dark circles under his eyes, the slow rise and fall of his chest as he breathes. He studies him like he’s a museum exhibit, a painting in the Louvre Clint’ll only ever see for ten seconds—beautiful, rare, and real. The corner of Phil’s mouth twitches, his smile slipping away, and he dips his head to start unhooking his watch.

“No,” Clint says immediately, and reaches out for him. His fingers splay over Phil’s side, and his heat radiates from under his shirt. Phil jerks his eyes back up, and Clint shakes his head. “Don’t just brush me off. Don’t—”

The words stick in the back of his throat, catching hoarsely, and Phil abandons his watch to half-slide, half-fall into bed at Clint’s side. The rain smell seeps into the sheets and the space between them, but it’s trailed by Phil’s deodorant and shampoo, scents Clint’s chased into the pillow on every lonely night alone. He drags Phil across the bed until they tangle and press together, barely hindered by the sheets and Phil’s slacks.

Phil’s almost too warm for the empty bed, and he sighs when Clint shoves his face into his neck and breathes in his skin. “I missed you,” he whispers. “I shouldn’t have left like I did, I just—”

“You’re not even supposed to be here,” Clint murmurs, his voice half-trapped in Phil’s collar. Phil pulls back a couple inches, and Clint glances up at him. “Your flight got cancelled. I figured you were in Denver at least for another half a day. _You_ figured you were in Denver for at least—”

“I rented a car,” Phil interrupts. Something like guilt crawls across his expression, and he tilts his head down toward the sheets. “I left like an idiot,” he says after a long, quiet sigh. “The last thing I wanted after everything you said—after how I acted—was to make you wait another day or two for me to make it home.” He raises his eyes carefully. “I wanted to come home.”

“I wanted you home, too,” Clint admits, and when Phil smiles—his soft, genuine, private smile, the smile Clint likes to claim as _his_ —he reaches up, threads his fingers in Phil’s hair, and kisses him.

It’s a hard, hungry, heady kiss, the kind of kiss that blooms hot and needy in the pit of Clint’s stomach, and Phil grips his hip as Clint closes the last couple inches of space between them. Their legs tangle in the sheets and then Phil’s looming over him, a thigh between his and an arm under the pillow as he coaxes his way into Clint’s mouth. Clint curls his fingers in Phil’s hair, almost tugging, and Phil moans.

Clint’s missed Phil’s moan. All at once, he’s missed everything about Phil—his hard breaths between harder kisses, the angle of his hip against Clint’s as they roll together, the way he nips Clint’s lower lip before he ducks his head to kiss Clint’s jawline and the curve of his throat. He fumbles with Phil’s belt, his fingers clumsy thanks to the distracting graze of Phil’s teeth against his pulse point; Phil’s hand joins his, opening the belt buckle before slipping into Clint’s shorts without much warning.

Clint hisses and bucks his hips up. He feels the crescent of Phil’s smile against his earlobe.

“I swear to god—” he starts to warn, but then Phil’s shoving his shorts and boxer-briefs out of the way, and Clint keens instead of finishing the sentence.

He struggles with Phil’s slacks for a minute, fighting with the fly and then the already-damp cotton of his underwear, but the second they find the red-hot friction of skin against skin, words become pretty unimportant. Their fists bump, uneven and out of practice, and Phil gasps against Clint’s neck as Clint nudges his arm out of the way and takes them both in hand. They rut together like teenagers under the bleachers, their breathing ragged and noisy in the quiet of their bedroom, and Clint groans aloud when Phil tilts his head and captures his lips in a greedy, open-mouthed kiss.

They share the last couple breaths before they tumble over the edge, Phil first and Clint three jerky breaths behind him, a mess of tangled limbs, helpless gasps, and ruined clothes.

The ruined clothes all end up on the floor, strewn around the hamper like the casualties of war. Clint strokes his fingers down the plane of Phil’s chest after he flicks the last tissue into the garbage can, then flops back onto his pillow. The sheet pools around their waists, half-covering them in the mostly-dark of their bedroom.

Clint runs his fingers through his hair before he glances back over at Phil. “We’ve gotta talk about this,” he says finally, and Phil tilts his head toward him on the other pillow. “We’ve gotta— I don’t know. Do something.” 

Phil’s mouth kicks up into a tiny smile. “I know we do.”

Clint scowls. “And you’re smiling about it?”

“Because I know that if you’re willing to lie here in our bed and open with ‘we need to talk,’ I’ve really messed something up,” he replies, his voice so quietly earnest that Clint’s whole chest aches. “And if that’s the case, I know you might just be willing to let me fix it.”

They lay together for a while in the dark, watching each other’s faces across the mattress. Phil’s lips purse together, his jaw setting and loosening almost imperceptibly; a foot or so away, Clint listens to his heart hammering in his ears. The seconds feel like hours, stretched out almost to the point of breaking while the drizzle lightly taps against the window panes.

Finally, though, Clint draws in a long breath. “You take the job?” 

“No,” Phil answers immediately, his voice so sharp and firm that Clint jerks his head up and accidentally meets his eyes. “I would never, _ever_ do something like that unless we had a conversation first. I wouldn’t just unilaterally—” 

“But you didn’t tell me,” Clint cuts in, and Phil’s jaw clenches shut. He rubs a hand over his face and turns to stare at the ceiling. “I wanna believe you, but jesus, Phil, you didn’t even bother to tell me.”

“Like you told me about how insecure you felt?” The tightness in Phil’s tone is a little betrayed by the note of hurt lurking underneath, and Clint swallows around the thick feeling in the back of his throat. “I should’ve told you,” he admits after a couple seconds, “but the honesty thing goes both ways. Because if you think I would’ve willfully ignored you once I knew how you felt, then—”

“Of course I don’t think that, but can you just look at the situation from where I was sitting for a second?” Clint rolls back over to face Phil, gesturing helplessly with a hand. “My guy runs off to a prestigious job, he stops calling and texting, he barely shows up home, and the next thing I know? He’s offered an extra-prestigious full-time position somewhere that could totally change his life—and I find out second-hand from his fucking ex-boyfriend.” Phil snorts all of a sudden, his mouth kicking up into a grin, and Clint stretches to kick his ankle under the sheets. “It’s not funny.”

“The fact you think that Ken and I ever dated is, actually.”

Clint huffs out an annoyed breath. “Yeah, ‘cause he’s only into your brain, not your—”

“Ken’s on his third wife, with a very heavy emphasis on _wife_ ,” Phil interrupts. Clint rolls his eyes, but Phil just stretches out a leg so he can nudge his cold toes against the top of Clint’s foot. “Ken and I never dated,” he repeats, voice low and genuine. “I harbored an unhealthy crush on him for our first year of law school, but so did the rest of my class. He was passionate and brilliant—a less-annoying version of Tony, at least back then—and I’m not sure I wanted to be with him as much as I wanted to _be_ him.” He shakes his head. “He only got arrogant after he got successful.”

“Fine, so he wasn’t born a prick, but what about the rest of it?” Phil raises his eyebrows curiously, and Clint shrugs a little. “Even if I believe you guys never dated and he only asked for you ‘cause you’re good at your job—”

“Your faith in my abilities is overwhelming.”

“—why’d he tell me about the open position?” Phil purses his lips and glances away. “‘Cause either he thought I knew and he wanted me to needle you about it, or he thought I _didn’t_ know and he wanted me to shit all over you.” Clint pauses, his stomach twisting slightly. “Which I kind of did.”

“Kind of,” Phil acknowledges, and his mouth quirks up into another tiny smile. Clint kinda smiles back at him, soft around the edges. Finally, Phil sighs. “Ken, he— You know that line from Thoreau about how, sometimes, a man hears a different drummer from anybody else?”

Clint frowns at him. “Are you seriously quoting Thoreau at me right now?”

“Says the man who devoured _Walden_ because ‘Bruce said it didn’t suck.’” Clint snorts at him, and for the first time since he climbed into bed, Phil’s smile reaches his eyes. “Ken doesn’t just hear his own drummer, but he thinks everyone should follow it,” he explains after another second of quiet. “He wanted me to come with him when he left the district attorney’s office, and then three years ago, when a high-level position opened up at the Colorado Attorney General’s office. Apparently, my talents are wasted here.” He sighs quietly. “I think he wanted to manipulate me.”

“Except I’m the one he aimed for,” Clint points out.

“Because he knew it’d hurt,” Phil replies quickly, and meets Clint’s gaze. “You never asked why I was working so many long nights, why I had a hard time calling, why coming home hit the bottom of the priority list. You assumed it was the work, and I let you assume that, but—” He releases a long, unsteady breath. “The truth is, I fell into the work because it was the path of least resistance.”

Clint feels his heart crawl up into the back of his throat. “The path away from what?”

“From missing you.” For a beat too long, Phil’s face is so open and honest that Clint almost forgets how to breathe. “You spend all this time pretending that you don’t matter—that no one could possibly give a damn once they’ve gotten a ten-second glimpse at your baggage—that you forget that I love you.” The full impact of the word smacks Clint in the chest, knocking the wind out of him, but Phil just shakes his head. “Before we met, I spent most of my time working except for occasional, unfulfilling relationships that ended the second my work schedule got the slightest bit inconvenient. You never questioned that part of my life. You never felt hurt because I needed to stay late or work through the weekend. Hell, most the time, you just sit next to me and make bad jokes.” 

Clint rolls his eyes a little at that, but when he glances back at Phil, Phil’s almost smiling. “You get used to a life like that, with an actual partner,” he continues, his voice a couple degrees softer than before. “You get used to having someone care about you, wanting to know where you are, how you feel, and I— It was a lot easier to fall back into my bad habits than feel empty every night.” He catches Clint’s eyes again. “And I think you did the same thing, too.”

The last sentence settles like a weight on Clint’s chest, and he tilts his head away for a couple seconds, staring at a random spot on the bed sheet. The room falls silent, and he realizes too late that the rain’s finally stopped. The only distraction now is their breathing, steady and soft in the darkness.

“If you want to know why I didn’t tell you about the job, it’s because I never wanted it,” Phil says after another long stretch of seconds. Clint glances over, watching as his shoulders and face both soften. “I told Ken that I’d think about it just to get him off my back, but the truth is, I picture our life—our long-term life together—here. In this house, with our friends and our jobs and our completely broken cat.” He offers Clint a tiny, half-smile, and somehow, Clint smiles back. The distance between them evaporates slowly, a foot turning into inches and their ankles crossing under the sheet; when Phil reaches out to cup Clint’s hip, he almost arcs into the touch. “I knew if I told you about the job, you’d want me to take it. And if I turned it down after that, you’d convince yourself it was your fault and that I regretted it.” He smoothes his thumb over Clint’s skin. “I don’t want that in the life we build together.”

Clint nods slightly, watching Phil’s fingers sweep against his skin. He feels words sitting on the back of his tongue, disorganized and tangled, and he can’t really sort them into complete sentences. Finally, he swallows around them. “You really think about our life like that?” he asks, and Phil’s thumb stops moving. He meets Phil’s eyes. “You think of us here, together, long-term? Solid?”

Phil smiles for the briefest of seconds, but his head tips down to where his fingers are spread over Clint’s hip. “I think about it all the time,” he answers after another second, his voice hardly above a whisper. “Some days, it’s the only thing I _can_ think about. It’s—” He draws in a long, steady breath. “Clint, I’ve been trying to figure out how to ask you to marry me since we visited my family at Christmas.”

He finds Clint’s eyes then, wide and honest and full of emotions Clint can’t even begin to name, and the air all rushes right out of Clint’s lungs. He feels like he’s blinded, a TV character caught in a flash-bang or a deer caught in headlights, and he just lies there for a long time, staring at Phil. All of a sudden, he’s aware of everything and nothing: he hears his pulse in his throat and feels Phil’s hand on his hip, but he’s not sure either of them are still breathing or that time’s actually ticking by. Everything narrows down to this pin-point moment, him and Phil on their bed, Phil’s words hanging over them.

When he sucks in a breath, he swears his whole body tenses with his lungs. His heart races when he exhales. And his own voice sounds distant and unfamiliar when he says, out of nowhere, “Don’t ask me now.”

Phil blinks, his whole face crumpling into an expression that’s part frown, part hopelessness, and Clint shakes his head hard enough that he feels it in his teeth. “I’m not— It’s not like I’m saying I don’t want to, it’s that—” He rubs a hand over his face, but everything muddles together in his head and mouth. Phil keeps staring at him, the hopelessness part of his expression slowly overtaking his face, and Clint sighs. “We fucked up, Phil,” he blurts, and watches as Phil presses his lips together. “We should’ve talked, we should’ve been honest, we should’ve dealt with the last couple months like adults and instead we ran around like idiots ‘til we were hurt and scared and—” 

The words escape again, so he reaches out and runs his own hand up the length of Phil’s arm, over to Phil’s side. His skin’s warm and familiar, and before Clint knows it, they’re tangled all the way together, their bodies pressed flush together. 

“I wanna say yes,” he says after they’ve laid there for probably too long, Phil’s face still soft and Clint’s heart still fluttering like a butterfly. “I want you to ask and I wanna say yes, but I want to do it when we’re back on the same page. When we’re not still hurt.” He tips his head down until their eyes meet. “When you’ll know exactly how much I mean it.”

Phil nods a little, a sort of shaky motion, and Clint scoots down just far enough that he can tip his face into Phil’s neck and settle there. Phil still smells like sweat and rain, and he pulls Clint close enough that Clint swears he can feel both their hearts beating, one after another. Almost like they’re one person, he thinks for a stupid second, and his lips brush Phil’s skin as he closes his eyes.

The silence settles all the way around them, an embrace all on its own, when Phil whispers, “I love you, you know that?”

Clint smiles against the heat of his neck. “Probably not as much as I love you,” he murmurs back, and he’s still smiling when he drifts off to sleep. 

 

==

 

“Wow, you’ve really got this ‘hot suburban dad’ thing down pat, don’t you?”

Clint hears her voice before he sees her, ringing out across the front yard like a bell, and he lets up on the weed whacker’s trigger to turn and watch Kate Bishop trek across the grass. She’s in cut-offs and a tank top, her hair loose and hanging in her face, and she grins as she flips her sunglasses up on top of her head.

“Don’t look so happy to see me,” she says.

“I was just thinking about how you always call me a creeper,” he retorts, and she laughs.

The rain from the start of the week finally broke the sweltering August hell-heat, and for the first time in a long while, Clint’s actually working out in the yard. He’d bitched about it all through their Saturday morning run, Phil laughing the whole time. He’d finally elbowed Phil in the ribs. “You could just make some sympathetic noises and then agree to help, you know.”

“That implies that you’d let me _not_ help,” Phil’d returned, and Clint’d sputtered so hard that he’d lost the race up to their doughnut place.

The last five days have felt pretty surreal, if Clint’s being honest. With Phil back in the office, in their house, in their _bed_ , he feels a little like he’s jumped in that blue phone box from that show Darcy loves and traveled back to the beginning of May. Phil’d spent most of the week in and out of meetings with Maria and Fury, reorganizing the felony cases they’d passed out to other attorneys. More than once, Clint’d walked by Phil’s office to find the guy frowning at a case file.

“If I’d known Bucky’s handwriting was this bad, I would’ve looked at the other people who applied for his job,” he’d complained one morning, squinting through his glasses. “He missed an opportunity by not going to medical school.”

Clint’d snickered into his coffee. He’d stopped by to bring Phil a fresh cup but stuck around for a couple seconds too long just to watch the guy work. “You know he’s the one who sympathy-pukes with Dot, right?”

“No, but remind me to use that against him the next time he asks me for a favor,” Phil’d replied, and flashed Clint a bright, private smile.

Clint’s still thinking about that moment, maybe a little too fondly, when Kate snaps her fingers in his face. He flinches back a couple inches, and she glares at him. “I didn’t come to visit so you could drift off into the twilight zone.”

He frowns. “You’re at least three decades too young to know about _The Twilight Zone_.”

“And I have about eight hundred too many channels on my dad’s cable package to _not_ know about it,” she retorts, crossing her arms over her chest. “Like I keep telling you, I’m not a kid.”

“Until it’s convenient to play the kid card, sure,” he agrees, and she breaks her disapproving glare to grin at him. He grins back, shaking his head a little, and leans the weed whacker against the crappy old garbage can they use to collect yard debris. “And as long as we’re talking about things you’re not, I think I need to remind you that you’re not supposed to—”

“And here I thought you _hadn’t_ acquired a teenager,” a voice behind them comments, and Clint twists around as Phil steps off the front porch. He’s in a t-shirt and a pair of worn old jeans with grass stains on the knees, and for a second, Clint wants to grab him by the belt loops and kiss him. 

Instead, he says, “She’s like that cat in the kid’s song, the one who keeps coming back no matter how hard you try to get rid of him.” Phil rolls his eyes, so Clint reaches out and drags him over by his belt loop—even if he skips the kiss. “You’re the Chief Assistant District Attorney. You tell her she can’t talk to me.”

Kate raises both her eyebrows, almost in a challenge, but Phil just shrugs. “Technically, her case isn’t active unless she violates her diversion,” he says, mouth kicking up into a smirk. “As long as you’re not currently prosecuting her case, she’s just a random teenager who keeps following you home.” 

Clint frowns at him, trying his best to ignore Kate’s victory cackle. “Some help you are,” he grumbles.

“Are you kidding?” Kate demands, and slugs Clint in the arm hard enough that it stings a little. “Your boyfriend’s _awesome_. I need to hang out with you guys a lot more often.”

Clint rubs the place where she punched him, and her grin grows. “You know that we’re both old enough to be your dad, right?” 

“And here, I remember a night where you spent an hour convincing me that my gray hairs didn’t make me old,” Phil deadpans, and Kate laughs again. He grins at Clint, the lines around his eyes bunching, and when Clint elbows him in the side as revenge, Phil swoops in and kisses him on the corner of the mouth. It’s a half-second contact, barely anything to write home about, but god, Clint _missed_ it. “I’m going to grab a bottle of water before I follow your exacting instructions on mowing the back yard. Do you want anything? Water, iced tea, s—”

“I’d love an iced tea,” Kate announces. Clint glances at her, and she shrugs. “It’s hot, I’m a guest, and I’m thirsty.”

“You’re not really a guest,” he returns, “and even if you were, it’s my iced tea.”

“You can share nicely, then,” Phil informs him, and pats him on the lower back before he slips out of Clint’s reach. Clint rolls his eyes. “One guest iced tea, one grumpy iced tea—”

“I don’t like the two of you ganging up on me,” Clint decides.

“—and a water for me. I’ll be back shortly.”

“Thanks, Barton’s boyfriend!” Kate calls after him, and Clint presses his lips together to stamp down on his grin. He figures out that he’s failed when Kate slugs him again, a little harder than the first time. “You didn’t give me his name, so he’s ‘Barton’s boyfriend’ until you tell me otherwise.”

“You couldn’t just ask for his name?” Clint returns, massaging his arm.

“That’d be too easy.” When he snorts at her, she lets her hands fall to her hips. “He’s better this time.”

He frowns. “Better?”

“Happier. Nicer. A lot more into you.” His frown deepens, and she huffs out a breath at him. “Please don’t tell me you really didn’t notice how weird and, I don’t know, detached he was the first time I met him.”

He sighs. “Like I said back then, he was working.”

“Maybe, but he wasn’t—” The words trail off, fading away into the afternoon air, and she shrugs. “You should have a boyfriend who’s into you,” she finally tells him, catching his eyes. “I mean, you don’t suck—”

“Nice that _that’s_ the best thing you can say about me.”

“—and you deserve somebody who also doesn’t suck.” She lifts her shoulders again. “You with this version of your boyfriend, that makes sense to me.”

Clint smiles a little. “Phil,” he says, and she blinks at him. “His name’s Phil. Just, you know, so you’re not shouting ‘Barton’s boyfriend’ out the window the next time you drive by or whatever.”

“I could always call him the Future Mrs. Barton,” she muses, and Clint laughs. A grin sparks across her face at that, tiny but full of trouble. It lingers for a couple seconds longer than is probably necessary, fading only when she brushes her hair out of her eyes and wets her lips. “But, uh, listen,” she says, “I just wanted to stop by and say, you know, thank you. I realized afterwards that you kind of went to bat for me the other day, and I—”

She shakes her head a little, the sentence dropping off, and Clint shoves his hands into the pockets of his shorts as he shrugs. “It’s what I do.” She snorts and rolls her eyes. “What?”

“It’s annoying when you act like it’s not a big deal.”

“But it’s _not_ a big deal.”

“Yeah, well, maybe it is to me,” she retorts. He rolls his lips together, watching as she toes the half-dead August grass with her sneaker. She flips her hair over her shoulder before she glances back up at him. “Anyway, I signed up for my stupid ‘positive choices’ class, which looks about as fun as a root canal—” She curls her nose at Clint’s grin. “—and I’m going to therapy again. And it turns out that I can hit some of my community service hours by doing some filing at legal aid. It’s a public service, I’d be doing a public service, whatever.” She waves a hand. “Wade got me an interview with his boss.”

Clint snorts. “Good luck with _that_.”

Kate narrows her eyes at him. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Barton, I swear to god—”

He raises his hands. “Emma Frost’s just a little on the ‘terrifyingly intense’ side, that’s all. Wade’s told a lot of stories about her.”

“Because Wade Wilson is the world’s best judge of character,” Phil chimes in, and Clint glances over as he approaches with two giant cups of iced tea—with lemon, just the way Clint likes it—and a bottle of water under his arm. He shakes his head. “Ignore Wade and Clint. Emma’s very competent, but mostly harmless.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “Says the guy who’s best friends with Maria Hill.”

Phil hands Kate one of the glasses before he cocks his head over at Clint. “Maria’s also mostly harmless.”

“And feeds on human tears like a sadness vampire,” Clint retorts, and Kate bursts out laughing when Phil hands him the water and helps himself to a couple big gulps of his tea, like some kind of juvenile punishment.

They elbow each other for a few seconds—well, okay, Clint elbows Phil, who ducks out of the way _still_ with his plastic cup of tea—while Kate just watches them, grinning. When they finally swap drinks, she adds, “I think I met Maria Hill. She seems okay.” They glance over her, almost in unison, and she shrugs. “She’s handling that case you got opened. You know, about the—stuff.”

She waves her hand when she says it, distracted, and Phil offers her a tiny, warm smile. “She’s good with people in your position,” he replies. Clint’s stomach twists at the quiet kindness in his voice and eyes. “She won’t let you get railroaded.”

Kate looks down at her iced tea, her lips pursed for a little too long. “It was just some preliminary thing. She even said that they’re not sure they’ll need me. I think she just wanted to hear what happened from the person it happened to, or whatever.”

Phil nods, his small smile still crinkling the lines around his eyes, and Clint stops messing with his lemon to glance over at Kate. “They’ll probably need you if they go all the way to trial,” he says, gently as he knows how. “I know they’re backtracking with the cops, and Cody’s gonna testify against the rest of them, but they’ll still—”

Kate cuts him off with a snort, tossing her hair over her shoulders. “They’ll never go to trial,” she tells him, and raises her head far enough to catch his eyes. “They’ll settle or find a way to throw the case out. _Something_ short of an actual jury trial.” She shakes her head. “They don’t want the attention. And maybe I’m okay with that.”

Next to Clint, Phil rolls his lips together. Clint just frowns. “You are?”

She lifts a shoulder in a loose, half-hearted shrug. “You might’ve been right about how the important part’s the part where you talk about it. At least, right now, that’s how it kind of feels.” Totally without his permission, his mouth kicks up into a grin, and he knows Kate catches it when she scowls at him. “Do _not_ get cocky, you doof,” she warns, and points a finger at him. “I’ll take back every nice thing I just said if you turn cocky.”

He raises his hands. “I’d never,” he promises, but he hears the laughter in his own voice.

“He really wouldn’t,” Phil offers, and Clint’s almost grateful for it until he notices the mischief dancing in the guy’s eyes. He’s already frowning suspiciously when Phil adds, “I’ve known him long enough to know that the only cocky bone in his body is his—” 

“She’s sixteen!” Clint squeaks. Heat floods his face and crawls down under his collar as Phil grins at him. “Do _not_ contribute to the delinquency of a minor by talking about—that!”

He punctuates it with a waggle of his iced tea, but across from him, Kate’s face lights up like a firework. “Okay, first, I’m totally aware of the facts of life,” she informs him, every word a little warmer and lighter than the last, “so there’s no delinquency here. And second: keep going, this is _awesome_.”

She leans on her _awesome_ so hard that Phil—master of the straight face and deadpan delivery—finally busts out laughing. Clint’s stomach clenches, but in that same way it did the first time he heard Phil laugh, the way that reminds him how stupidly head-over-heels he is for the guy next to him.

He still manages to groan, though, and to shake his head. “I hate you both,” he informs them.

Kate rolls her eyes. “You _so_ do not mean that.”

And yeah, you know what? She’s right.

 

== 

 

“You asked for case law about this, your honor, and I did the best I could with what’s out there, but the truth is, this is pretty much an issue of first impression.” Clint stops fiddling with his pen and sets it down on the edge of the podium before he glances up at Judge English. “Nothing in the statutes prohibits it, nothing suggests that we should just stick with aggravated battery in this case—or even that aggravated battery really fits—so if you’ll give me a couple minutes, I want to explain why I think there’s evidence to bind Mr. Caggiano over on attempted vehicular homicide along with the DUI.”

Judge English nods. “Go ahead, Mister Barton.”

It’s a breezy, sunny, gorgeous August Tuesday, the kind of summer day that reminds you of community swimming pools and huge popsicles melting all over your fingers. Clint’d lingered on their back patio that morning, barefoot and drinking his coffee while Phil banged around in preparation for his second truly full day back at the office. They’d spent the night before poring over case files—Phil catching up on what he’s missed, Clint prepping for this evidentiary hearing—at the kitchen table, their heads bent together and the conversation pretty scarce.

“I’m never leaving again,” Phil’d muttered at one point, forehead in his hand.

“I can pin you to the bed to make sure of that,” Clint’d replied, and they’d grinned at one another before diving back into their work.

The work and the sunlight both feel distant as Clint glances back down at his notes one final time, pulling in a big breath as he rereads his own chicken scratch. He knows the facts and the law like the back of his hand, but the victim’s sister is sitting three rows behind him, and the longer he pauses, the more he can hear her sniffling into her balled up tissue.

He exhales.

“I’m not gonna go on some rant about the facts,” he says, looking back up at the judge, “because the court knows the facts. Mr. Caggiano had a couple drinks. He knew that alcohol could interact with his medication. He tried to drive home anyway, and he ended up causing an accident that caused Mr. Haggerty permanent brain damage.” He glances over his shoulder at defense table for a second, where Caggiano keeps wringing his hands. “Like Mr. Volstagg argued in his motion to dismiss—and like he’ll probably argue again in a minute—I don’t know if we can say that Mr. Caggiano acted recklessly. He admitted that he’d never had more than half a beer while on these meds, and our laws say that recklessness means you see a major danger and ignore it. I don’t know if there was a major danger for Mr. Caggiano to see until it happened.”

Clint turns back to the judge, his fingers curling on the sides of the podium. “But here’s what I do know: our vehicular homicide statute says that the driver had to act unreasonably, and we’ve got that here. Because I think it’s fair to say that a reasonable person wouldn’t jump behind the wheel when they’ve been warned that their meds and booze don’t mix. And with every requirement up to the actual death present in this case—driving the car, creating a risk of injury or death, the unreasonableness—I think it’s fair to say that, yeah, there’s probable cause that Mr. Caggiano committed attempted vehicular homicide.” 

He stops to skim over his notes, aware for a second how quiet the whole courtroom is, hushed like everybody’s collectively waiting for a pin to drop. On the bench, the judge clears her throat. “Anything else, Mr. Barton?”

“The State’d just ask that the court finds probable cause for the DUI—under the unsafe operation of the vehicle subsection—the attempted vehicular homicide charge, and the aggravated battery under the bodily harm subsection.” Clint forces a tiny smile. “Thanks.”

“Thank you. Mr. Volstagg, I believe you have an argument about that last charge?”

“I do, your honor,” Volstagg replies. He levers himself out of his squeaky chair like a pro, all easy manner and easier grins, and Clint kind of chuckles at him as he steps out of the way. He drops his portfolio on the prosecution table and starts to drop into his own chair before he notices the man at the back of the courtroom.

His breath catches in his throat.

Because standing just inside the doorway, his suit coat hanging open and his hands in the pockets of his slacks, is Chief Assistant District Attorney Phil Coulson.

Clint blinks at him in surprise, but Phil just offers one of his soft, private smiles. 

Standing next to the prosecution table, Clint smiles back.

And for the first time all summer, he thinks that things might just end up okay after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The most recent MPU posting schedule can be found [here](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/80286374741/the-latest-and-greatest-posting-schedule-please). A story I wrote for Miles's birthday, called "Don't Tell Your Dad," can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1353427).
> 
> The final chapter of Diversions _will_ appear at some point next week. I will be out of town (at saranoh's!) on the actual posting date, so I cannot be sure it will be precisely on time. But i promise you: you will get your resolution.


	16. Asked and Answered

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint’s first year at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office introduced him to friends who became family, to a job he feels passionate about, and to the man he loves. In short, it changed his life in ways he never imagined possible.
> 
> But nothing guarantees that the good times will last forever. 
> 
> In this chapter, summer ends, fall begins, and Clint’s life finally makes sense again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to my wonderful, patient, helpful, caring betas, who saw me through this story despite the fact that it fought me the whole time. They tolerated all of my anxiety, all of my errors and omitted words, and stood by me like the wonder women they are. Jen and saranoh, here's to all the stories left to tell.

“Hey,” Phil says quietly, and holds out a beer.

“Hey yourself,” Clint replies, and he smiles a little too warmly when their fingers brush.

It’s a crisp, almost cool early September afternoon in Stark’s back yard, the kind of afternoon that reminds you about the existence of seasons. Clint’s waited for an afternoon like this for the last month as he dragged himself through one sweltering weekend after another, his clothes drenched with sweat every time he stepped out into the yard to mow or just pick up the mail. He knows that the summer’ll creep back in for one last sucker-punch before the leaves start to change, but right now, he’s enjoying his jeans and the comfortable breeze.

He slides down on the porch swing and pats the cushion next to him. Phil rolls his eyes, but he sits down anyway.

It’s funny, in a way, how the first three months of summer dragged on like some kind of funeral march but the last one’s flown by, every day whipping past quick enough that Clint swears he’s developed some kind of reality whiplash. His last three dockets’d consisted mostly of idiot college students driving around campus too fast and while under the influence of various substances, and he’s pretty sure that the stupidity’s multiplying. Just yesterday, the Friday docket before Labor Day (another heavy drinking weekend, just what the DUI attorney ordered), Darcy’d thrown a stack of files onto her desk and tossed up her hands. 

“I swear to god I’m going to quit,” she’d declared, and Clint’d at least glanced away before rolling his eyes. “I’m serious, Clint. If I have to go toe-to-toe with another nineteen-year-old who jumped into a car after his sixth red cup full of Bud Lite, I might actually murder someone.”

Clint’d rolled his lips together to keep from smirking. “You know you could’ve offered to be Maria’s intern,” he’d reminded her for about the third time that week.

She’d very maturely flipped him off before storming down to Jane’s cubicle to complain.

Clint knows he’s not alone in the bumper-crop docket—Bucky’s prosecuted six public nudity cases in the last six weeks, Steve’s burned the candle at so many ends that he mistyped the words _to-wit_ on seven different charging documents, and last Clint checked, Bruce’d removed a sibling group of eight kids from their mother’s crack den—but he feels like he’s drowning in it, anyway. The only saving grace is the fact that every night, he walks out to the parking lot with Phil right next to him.

Phil’s swamped too, of course—he’s still picking up the slack from his eight-plus weeks away, a fact Maria reminds him of pretty much every time she calls, texts, or e-mails—but he’s the kind of swamped where he actually talks about it over dinner, or on their runs, or in bed. One night, he’d walked into the living room with a stack of law enforcement affidavits and dropped onto the couch next to Clint. “I swear Maria’s punishing me,” he’d complained, and Clint’d grinned as he abandoned his glasses on the coffee table. “It’s like every case she hands me is two degrees more convoluted than the last. I’m starting to think she’s cribbing Agatha Christie mysteries just to make me head hurt.”

Clint’d grinned as Phil’d slid into his space and settled against him. “Could be you’re just not used to real prosecution anymore,” he’d joked, and Phil’d elbowed him hard enough that he’d coughed instead of laughing.

In the end, they’d dug through the affidavits together, charting witness statements on an Excel document until one in the morning.

Clint’d loved every damn second of it.

He loves every damn second of this, too, swaying idly on Stark’s porch swing like at the last couple barbeques, cold beer splashing across his tongue as he watches yet another Stark brand whiffle ball game. Stark’d climbed up on a crappy plastic lawn chair about ten minutes before the game started, a beer in one hand and a half-eaten bratwurst in the other, and announced the rematch with all the pomp and circumstance of an Olympic announcer. Bruce’d rolled his eyes and planted a hand on the guy’s hip to keep him from falling face-first onto the grass.

“But before we get started,” he’d said, holding the beer bottle up over his head, “I just wanted to remind you why you are gifted and privileged enough to be at my house, eating my food and petting my adorable dogs.”

“Because you demanded we come?” Natasha’d asked, and Pepper’d hidden her smile behind her water bottle.

Tony’d rolled his eyes before promptly ignoring her. “We are here today, on this day of laboring—or at least, in honor of laboring, because the whole point of the holiday is that we _don’t_ labor—”

Bucky’d groaned. “Today, Tony.”

“—for three very important reasons. First: my fairy goddaughter, the keeper of entirely too many names for a five-year-old—” Steve’d shot him a pretty murderous look at that. “—has successfully completed exactly three weeks of all-day kindergarten. The other five-year-olds have welcomed their benevolent overlord with open arms and I, for one, am very proud.”

Steve’s glare had loosened up a little at that, and disappeared all the way when Dot’d crowed, “I’m a benovolenut oval lord!” She’d stuck her hands up in the air, almost beaning her dad with the whiffle bat, and then frowned while everybody else laughed. “What’s that mean?” she’d asked, glancing over at Miles.

Miles’d forced a little grin. “It means you’re the best,” he’d replied. “Well, sort of, anyway.” But Dot’d apparently missed the second part, she’d cheered for herself so loud.

“Second,” Tony’d continued once the only person still cheering was a grinning, drooling Astrid Odinson, “we are once again congratulating my better half—”

“At least you admitted I’m the better half,” Bruce’d muttered.

“—on his ascent into his forties. Which, I should note, is the best decade, all things considered.”

“Speak for yourself!” Darcy’d chimed up from the back, and—for about the fifth time that afternoon—Grant Ward’d looked very embarrassed to be standing next to her.

“And third and finally,” Stark’d continued, pointing his beer bottle vaguely in Clint’s direction, “I wanted to officially commemorate the return of our prodigal son-of-Coul to the fold, and I certainly hope you all see what I just did there.” The group’d released a collectively horrified groan, for the most part, but Clint’d glanced over to grin at the guy next to him. Phil, his face a little flushed from the sun but also from the attention, had raised his beer in response, and he and Stark’d air-toasted across the yard before Stark pounded the rest of his beer. “Okay, rampant sentimentality shit over, time to eviscerate the Rogers-Barnes team like they’re the Royals,” he’d concluded, and he’d used Bruce a little like a fire pole when he jumped off the chair.

Except nobody keeps score at whiffle ball, as far as Clint can tell, and the teams change randomly depending on who needs a drink, creating this weird chimera game that shifts every time he blinks. Right now, Maria’s inches from stealing third base, only half-heartedly guarded by tipsy shortstop Jasper Sitwell, and Dot’s poking her third-baseman cousin in the ribs as she waits for Bucky to bat. Natasha rolls the plastic ball between her hands as Tony, the world’s worst catcher, flashes her slightly lewd pitch symbols between his legs. In the outfield, Ward stands suspiciously close to his date—one of the juvenile clerks, a kid almost as skinny as Darcy’s boyfriend—while Peggy threatens them with bodily harm if they miss a fly ball.

It’s funny, really, how they’ve formed this ridiculous group, this strange found family that gathers together on holiday weekends and stuffs themselves full of grilled meat and various mayonnaise salads. Short of a couple hastily-organized Independence Day bashes back at the trailer park, Clint’s never really had that before, and now, sitting on the swing next to his guy, he realizes he’s had a whole year of it.

More than a year, he amends as he sips his beer. He’s just spent too much time hating the summer to really, you know, count it.

He’s thought a lot about his summer over the last four weeks, too, indexing the events that’d turned June and July into a shit storm and learning—or trying to learn—to move past them. He and Phil’ve spent a lot of long nights lying together in their bedroom and talking, meandering through all the stuff they never bothered sharing. Clint’s heard about every one of Phil’s exes, the guys who hardened him ‘til he figured he’d never wake up every morning to the same guy; in return, Clint’s sketched out the messier details of his life, the ones he’s spent years of hard-earned energy clamping down on. Some nights, they’d laid themselves so bare that words stopped mattering anymore, and they’d found other ways to share their feelings—and work out the pain one or both of them’d felt.

Other nights, they’d laughed hard enough at some long-past stupidity that their guts hurt from it.

Clint’d tried explaining this to Barney one night, the two of them sitting out on the back patio while Phil’d run out to pick them up Chinese food. Barney’d shown up unannounced with a six pack of beer and dark circles under his eyes, muttering about his girlfriend being a whole collection of slurs Clint never needs to hear again. He’d held open the door for him, found a book of matches for his smokes, and then they’d headed out back so Barney could chain smoke his frustration away.

“You said saying shit makes it real,” Clint’d reminded him, and Barney’d huffed out a long line of smoke. “That’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to put the pieces back together the way we should’ve before I ever showed up at the park that one day.” He’d rolled his lips together as his brother flicked ash out into their yard. “Maybe that’s what you need to do with Ally.”

“Not everybody lands Mr. Right,” Barney’d replied, shaking his head.

“Only because Mr. Right’s not an actual thing,” Clint’d returned, and even though he’d rolled his eyes, Barney’d kind of smiled.

Clint smiles as he thinks about all that—and then, about the way Barney and Phil’d chatted sports all through dinner—and loses himself in his own head for a couple seconds before he feels Phil’s eyes searching his face. He stops halfway through a swallow of beer to glance over, and for a second, he’s forgets how his higher brain functions work at all. Because for that one beat, there’s no whiffle ball game or cool September breeze, there’s just him, and the guy who loves him, and a couple inches of thin swing cushion keeping them apart.

“What?” Clint asks when he finds his breath again.

Phil shakes his head. “Nothing,” he replies, and there’s a lie if Clint’s ever heard one.

He keeps his mouth shut about that, though, the ball of his foot rolling against the ground to keep the swing swaying, and he tips his head back to stare at the sky. There’s another long docket waiting for him on Tuesday, plus a motions hearing for the trial against Kate’s assailants that he really wants to sit in on, and he’s supposed to remind Wade to forward over Kate’s community service hours from legal aid. He lists everything out in his head, invisible line-items waiting for invisible check marks, and when he’s finished, he closes his eyes. He thinks about Kate Bishop for a couple seconds—she still reads at the park some afternoons, and Clint’s guilty of abandoning his work for ten or fifteen minutes every time he sees the purple VW scream into the parking lot—and about the guilty pleas two of Evan Unger’s little cohorts recently signed.

“I don’t mind,” Kate’d told him in the park one afternoon, a dog-eared copy of _Tuesdays with Morrie_ open on the bench next to her. “In a way, it’s better than them getting the case thrown out, you know? They actually have to admit what they did.”

He’d nodded, but he’d felt himself frown. “They might not even get jail time.”

“But they’ll know,” she’d said, casting him one long, serious-eyed look. “I don’t know if guys like Evan can be rehabilitated or whatever, but I think maybe, with the other guys, going through this is enough.” She’d shrugged. “And if it’s not, well, fuck them. Now, can I tell you about the _depressing_ book Jonas lent me, or what?” 

He’d laughed. “Go ahead,” he’d said. By the end of the conversation, he’d vowed to never read a Mitch Albom book in his life.

He almost cracks that joke to Phil now—he’s not sure he ever mentioned that part of his conversation with Kate, what with how crazy work’s been over the last week or so—but when he glances over, Phil’s watching him again. His face flushes a little pink when Clint catches him.

Clint frowns. “Okay,” he asks, and plants a foot to stop the swing. “What’d I do?” 

Phil blinks. “Do?” 

“Yeah, what’d I do? Because every time I look over, you’re staring at me like I’m a ghost, and it’s kind of freaking me out.” Phil smiles a little, glancing out at the whiffle ball diamond. “Do I have something in my teeth?” he needles, and Phil snorts when he elbows him. “Did I dribble hot sauce on my shirt? Is there something sticky in my hair from our pre-party activities? _Something_?”

He watches as Phil rolls his eyes good-naturedly, complete with a warm smile that crinkles his laugh lines, and he tries to ignore the way his stomach clenches when the guy finally looks back at him. He’d spent so much damn time worrying that he’d lose that smile that he’d forgotten how to bask in it, to soak up all the love Phil sends his way. He’s relearning that skill.

He’s relearning a lot, really.

Next to him, Phil nudges the ground so the swing starts swaying again and, once they’re moving, shrugs. “I was just thinking, that’s all,” he admits.

“Thinking?” Clint echoes, and Phil nods. He frowns, shifting around in on the bench just far enough that he can study Phil’s face. “About something specific, or just in general?”

He’s not sure why his breath catches when their eyes meet, or why his whole body stutters at the almost bashful smile Phil offers him, but both things happen so hard and fast that he thinks being hit by a freight train’d hurt less. He swallows around the thick feeling in the back of his throat, but it’s too late: he’s already drowning in the way Phil looks at him, and in the warmth of his gaze.

He’s swept all the way out to sea when Phil answers, “About how I’d like to ask you to marry me—for real, this time.”

Out beyond them in the yard, somebody hits the whiffle ball while somebody else runs, and Dot shouts about untied shoe laces loud enough to wake the dead. But next to Clint, swaying idly with the swing and the breeze, Phil’s quiet and smiling, and Clint can’t look away from him.

What he can do is close the distance between them and find Phil’s hand, grabbing it hard enough that he’s sure the guy can feel the little tremor of nerves that runs through him. “The answer to that was always gonna be yes, boss,” he says quietly, and smiles back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am spending the weekend with saranoh, who is not only an MPU beta but also [my coauthor on 180 Days and Counting](http://archiveofourown.org/works/649368/chapters/1181191) and [quite the author in her own right](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SaraNoH/pseuds/SaraNoH). Together, we're planning a video Q&A for our readers. Feel free to [throw questions our way](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/81578034958/kate-sara-q-a). We'll be keeping questions open for a couple days, at least.
> 
> And thanks to all of you, my wonderful, _wonderful_ readers, for sticking with me for another 16 chapters. I hope you'll stick around for the short stories I'll be posting over the next couple weeks, and then the next long-form story: "Chain of Custody," with Bruce and Tony as the focal points.
> 
> You guys are absolutely the greatest.


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